Technology and Science

Frameworks are gradually expanding their reach into other areas of Web-application development. Combined with Java’s advances with new and extended standard libraries, it means future Web applications will use some exciting new technologies.

The fastest growing segment of the Web-application community is the area of mobile and wireless application. Although some frameworks already focus on this market segment (Roaming Media Framework and Java Micro Framework), others also provide services to both desktop and mobile clients, such as Cocoon with its advanced WML support.

Web Services

Web services have actually been around ever since the Internet first came into existence: but the “client,” so far, has been people, and not programs! Regular HTML over HTTP is an example of a simple kind of Web service: you type a URL and get a page. Web services as a method for applications to interact with other applications, though, are a different story.

Web services have recently acquired a new definition in the Web-application scene, and this new combination of existing technologies has already had a large impact on many organizations’ development plans.

XML

The emergence of XML and various standards for its use has provided powerful tools for data sharing. Particularly, with the use of transformation technology such as XSL/XSLT, XML has quickly become the lingua franca for data exchange, particularly on the Web. XML, when used in conjunction with data type definitions (DTDs), provides a self-describing and structured data transport.