Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
AppBuilder

> ## SmartB2BObjects

> The SmartB2BObject helps you make your applications capable of business-to-business communication. It handles transformation between the internal data representation and the emerging standard for inter-business communication, the eXtended Markup Language (XML). Figure 6–1 illustrates how the SmartB2BObject fits into an application that can communicate with another business over the Internet.

> Figure 6–1: SmartB2BObject in inter-business communications

> XML is related to HTML, the HyperText Markup Language of the Web. Both XML and HTML are descendents of SGML, the Standard Generalized Markup Language used in high-end publication editors.

> A detailed description of XML is well beyond the scope of this document, but you can find specifications and descriptions in a number of sites on the Web. The standards body for XML, as for HTML, is the WorldWide Web Consortium (W3C), an international organization. The W3C is hosted in the Americas by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, in Europe by the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) at several locations in France, and in Asia by Keio University at their Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan.

> The W3C sponsors several ongoing engineering committees, including the XML Schema Working Group. The consortium’s Web site has information about these working groups, including instructions for joining them if you want to help with their work. The Web site also has primary instructional materials, standards documents, pointers to tools such as schema validators, and links to other sites. Their URL is `http://www.w3.org`.

Copyright © 2005 Progress Software Corporation www.progress.com Voice: (781) 280-4000 Fax: (781) 280-4095