News

Snapbridge set to unveil XML data federation tool

• By Rich Seeley
• December 3, 2003

Snapbridge Software, an XML technology start-up based in San Diego, is set to unveil a drag-and-drop tool for XML and non-XML data federation at the XML Conference and Exposition in Philadelphia next week.

Noting that the Philadelphia conference, co-hosted by the W3C, OASIS and other standards groups, is historically important because it is where the original XML specification was first presented, Benjamin Chen, Snapbridge chairman and CTO, said it was an ideal venue to bring out his company's developer toolkit. It is where he hopes his technology will reach an audience of programmers dedicated to the application of XML technology.

The toolkit is designed to help developers who may not know XML syntax backwards and forwards, and to provide a productivity boost for even the most expert programmer, Chen said.

As he explained to XML Report, ''Traditional tools in the marketplace today require you to know the syntax for using XSL in a very literal fashion. They make things more cumbersome than they have to be.''

The toolkit employs Snapbridge FDX, a patent-pending data federation technology announced this past summer for making transformations that bring XML and non-XML data into the same applications.

''What we've done is focused on one of the core areas of use for XSL and that is on the HTML side,'' Chen said. ''If you are going to be generating HTML as a part of your output, we don't constrain the developer to have to know all the literal syntax for XSL. You will be given a drag-and-drop environment. You can take something like a form from Microsoft FrontPage, put it into one pane and then you can take data sources -- you might have XML data to map into that pane -- and multiple sources of XML.''

Beyond XML, Chen said, the toolkit makes it possible to also federate non-XML data and information from Web services.

''You can drag-and-drop from relational databases,'' he explained. ''You'll be able to grab those tables and automatically map them. You'll be able to go out and grab Web services. You can grab WSDLs and map in information from those and federate that content. You'll be able to do that with log files, flat files. This is stuff that has traditionally been very tedious and time-consuming. This will streamline the process for producing XSL.''

After it is unveiled at the XML conference in Philadelphia next week, Chen said the toolkit will be available for download from http://www.snapbridge.com.