Exploring formats

As we have seen in the previous sections, integration works with flows (synchronous or asynchronous) of small information bites (in the form of messages) to be acted upon. Such messages are usually formatted into well-known shapes. Let's have a quick overview of the most common ones.

XML

Ostracized for being verbose and cumbersome, and often considered old and past it, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is simply here to stay. And for good reason, since, as we will see, it has a number of powerful and useful features. To start, XML files are expressive and structured, and there is a lot of tooling supporting them.

This is what a simple XML file looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<myTag>
  <mySubTag myAttribute="myValue" >my content</mySubTag>
</myTag>

I'm sure everybody is familiar with XML; however, just to set common ground, the characteristics of a proper...