XML is increasingly being positioned as the next territory for the Microsoft/Oracle/IBM database war. However, the companies aren't telling you this, because none of them are very good at the technology yet.

X-Hive/DB is a state-of-the-art database for XML documents. It provides a revolutionary new way to store, retrieve and query them, and so is ideal for mission-critical applications requiring the storage of very large volumes of such documents.

By Eric van der Vlist – Mike Kay from Software AG gave a high level comparison between XSLT and XQuery at the fourth Forum XML, where he concluded that the main differences between the two languages were differences of culture and perspective, but also that XQuery was more ambitious than XSLT and wo

Read an Interview with Vivek Chopra and Zoran Zaev (authors of Professional XML Web Services).

by Martin Gudgin, Timothy Ewald – One key to designing a web service is determining what information a client and server will pass back and forth on the wire. This process has two stages. First, you need to develop an abstract notion of what data needs to be exchanged, e.g., an Invoice, an Itinerary

by Leigh Dodds – Reporting on the most recent XML-DEV discussions, the XML-Deviant finds growing support for getting the "packaging problem" wrapped up once and for all.

Ruple is a technology that allows disparate applications to collaborate, and is an implementation of Linda tuple spaces. Patrick Thompson of Rogue Wave explains:

The Sun RELAX NG Converter is a tool to convert schemas written in various schema languages to their equivalent in RELAX NG. It supports schemas written in XML DTD, RELAX Core, RELAX namespace, TREX, W3C XML Schema, and RELAX NG itself.

by Antoine Quint – SVG's long gestation resulted in a specification that had some solid and diverse support from the moment it was released. This article aims at providing an overview of available SVG tools, including highlights of what's cooking in the short term in the SVG world. This arti

By Eric van der Vlist – Focused on Web Services, the opening keynote session from the fourth Forum XML in Paris showed a mismatch between a need for information integration and the current orientation of Web Services toward application integration.