By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 6/29/98

Greetings, my children. I have just been ordained. No, really, would I lie about such a matter? Just go to www.ulc.net and you, too, can be ordained.

Now I feel compelled to act like a man of the cloth. So I'll sermonize on the wholly useful intranet trinity: reusability, content and business.

In the software development world, the concept of reusable code has become a Holy Grail. In its JavaBeans component architecture, Sun Microsystems achieves modular reusability through objects, written in Java, that have highly structured interfaces. The way an object communicates its functions and relationships to other objects is so well structured that a number of vendors besides Sun offer tools that allow developers to build programs graphically. They create applications by dragging objects, called Beans, onto a virtual work surface and by linking inputs and outputs.

Microsoft offers much the same procedure for its ActiveX technology. Although, sinner that the company is, Microsoft insists ActiveX is as secure as Java when it patently isn't. Bill, for your penance, say 1,024 Hail McNealy's.

Object technology is a huge boon for IT groups building intranet applications, whether they are using Web server APIs, servlets on the back end or applets on the front end. It makes it much easier to tweak code - part of the inevitable iterative development of programs.

To make reusability really pay off, you need to extend this concept to intranet content. Part of the strategy for doing so involves the use of templates to achieve the same look and feel across pages, and part of it is in setting and enforcing a content development process.

But this only addresses the control of appearance. What we really need is reusable information. Let me stress that reusable data is not as useful as reusable information. For example, the data about 1997 month-by-month sales is generally much less useful after the fact than an analysis of trends and factors that generated those sales.

To create information, you need to provide structure to your data. The only workable technology for doing so is the World Wide Web Consortium's Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard. XML lets you embed structure in data.

When you extract data from a legacy database through a Web server, you typically lose the context of the data as far as applications are concerned. In our 1997 sales report, for example, the Western Region's June sales figures would be in the middle of a table. It's tricky to translate that information into a form so that it is readable by another application.

But XML retains the context of data. This lets applications receive data with its meaning intact.

For example, let's say that I'm searching a legacy database for customers who have spent more than $100,000 in the past year. A Web server typically delivers the results of this query as a tabular display. If you trap this output and feed it into a spreadsheet, you have to rely on the consistent placement of data fields as defined by lines, tabs and spaces. But one minor change in layout format and the transfer fails. Worse still, such a fragile environment - a veritable devil's playground - more or less guarantees that you'll have problems.

But with XML, you wrap each record and field in custom tags that define the data's structure and content. In my example, you'd tag each record as something like <customer> . . . </customer> and within that record, tag each customer name, for example, Fred Smith, as <cust_name>Fred Smith</cust_name>. The data is implicitly reusable. Talk about heaven!

To make sure users create documents with XML, provide templates for standard documents types and mandate their use. Teach users who are creating documents on an ad hoc basis how to add XML markup and explain why it's desirable.

However, XML will only be of limited value if you don't understand the data with which your company actually works. So you'll need to survey the kind of data that comes in and goes out and create appropriate templates. In the process, you'll be doing something that IT groups rarely do: examining the details of business operations.

By building content using XML, planning for reusability and providing users with appropriate authoring techniques, you'll get the best possible bang for your buck from your intranet investment.

So here endeth my sermon.

May your god go with you.

Besides acting as editorial advisor for Intranet, Gibbs does weddings, funerals and network exorcisms. You can reach him at imcolumn@gibbs.com.