It is very common today to see XML-based technologies employed, for various purposes, in e-commerce. It’s popularity is increasing due to the advantages XML offers over other traditional database technologies.
One of the main reasons for increasing XML adoption consists of the fact that XML is more future-proof – data stored in XML does not necessarily depend on a specific application to enable users to make use of it. If a company stores it’s data in a SQL database, for example, retrieving the data a few years from now might not be a simple task – the format supported by SQL database applications might change, or the particular SQL application used by the company might not be available anymore due to bankruptcy or other reasons. This is an unlikely scenario, but nevertheless possible; XML avoids these potential issues because it’s data is stored as text, which can be searched; therefore, a simple text editor can be used to retrieve data from an XML document, or edit it.
Additionally, there are many XML processors available, which are relatively easy to adapt for a particular XML type of document. This is a direct result of XML being extensible by definition.
Another benefit resulting from XML’s textual nature is that corrupt data is likely to be more salvageable than a database file; a few corrupt bytes will not render the XML file useless – most of the data can still be accessed – this is likely to be an important issue for companies.
XML is also being increasingly used for communications between applications, services and web-servers, via the XML-RPC ( Remote Procedure Call ) protocol.
