"XML and Web services have been touted for years as the new lingua franca for application development, destined to transform the way companies conduct business and communicate. Lingua franca, or "bastardized French," was a pidgin or trade language used a couple of hundred years ago by various language communities around the Mediterranean to communicate with others whose language they didn't speak.

XML, by itself, can't be a lingua franca, since it really isn't even a language; it's more an alphabet or limited set of characters for sending information between application systems. And just because applications speak XML doesn't mean that they can talk to each other, anymore than English and French speakers will understand each other despite using languages based on the same alphabet.

For two applications to communicate they must also agree on the specific data standards to be encoded in XML, hence all the current squabbling over Web services (W-S) standards. Case in point is the proposed reliable-network protocol that identifies, manages and tracks the reliable delivery of messages between source and destination Web services. Currently, there are two competing specifications: WS-Reliable Messaging (using a specification supported by IBM, Microsoft, BEA, and TIBCO) versus WS-Reliability (promoted by Oracle, Sun, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sonic Software, among others)."

NewsForge