Why XML?

Communication with other systems

Using a variety of XML based protocols, Amaxus is able to communicate with other systems and use the returned information. Three examples of how Amaxus communicates with other systems are:
 
External site search using RDF
The RDF protocol supports the interoperability of metadata, allowing resources on the web to describe themselves.
Using RDF (Resource Description Framework), it is possible to search the contents of another site and provide links to that information. As long as a site provides an RDF document (as Amaxus does) that summarizes its content then it can be searched and linked to.

For more information on RDF see  XML.com - What is RDF?

RSS Newsfeed
Many sites provide an RSS (RDF Site Summary) feed. In essence, this is an XML document describing the latest information to be published on a site. News sites in particular incorporate this technology, which gives other unrelated sites the opportunity to display links to these news items on their own site. Amaxus allows you to specify any number of news feeds to use, you can even display different news feeds on different parts of the site.
For example, it would be possible to show the latest UK news from the BBC on your site by linking to this RSS feed:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/syndication/feeds/news/ukfs_news/uk/rss091.xml

For more information on RSS see What is RSS?

Web Services
While RDF & RSS allow you to find out whats on another site, web services allow you to actually use applications on a different site. It uses an XML based specification called SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and can be used to provide functionality on a site that would otherwise be expensive and time consuming to implement. For example, using Amaxus, it is possible to use a web service to send an SMS message directly to a mobile phone anywhere in the world. The Box UK site uses this facility to enable contact details to be sent to a users mobile phone.

For more information on Web Services see
XML.com - A Web Services Primer.