Anybody using XML for real?

I know we're bombarded in the press about it, but is anyone really using it?

I've seen it in use to manage some web sites. Astray.com comes to mind. He explains how he generates the site on the site. Otherwise, like any other primarily middleware and server-side technology it's hard to spot.

It seems to me that the promise of XML is portability of data. Has anyone done any data porting that worked smoothly?

iBelong uses extensively XML and Java for the portal developments
to the affinity groups in USA. http://www.ibelong.com
around 30 portals have been developed till today. http://buckmasters.ibelong.com http://legion.ibelong.com http://americanflyers.ibelong.com http://wm.ibelong.com http://workingfamilies.ibelong.com
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We're using XML in our messaging system - sending XML messages between some legacy systems and our internal system. Works quite well, and is very flexible for the future.

Just an added comment that hit me - XML is used extensively in JMS (Java Messaging System). This seems like a pretty hot API - I've been researching it lately and look forward to using it in the future. It leverages XML's genericness and ubiquity.

Originally posted by Paul Wheaton:
I know we're bombarded in the press about it, but is anyone really using it?
Hi wheaton,
Xml is being used mainly in the b2b project like hell people are really looking forward for the tools that write and parse xml i think there are lots of them.We use DOM of microsoft which is good for small size of xml files.
Hope your question is answered if not let me know
Have Fun
sri

Office Depot is also beginning to use it heavily. I already had to get my feet wet in it (XML)

It's used mainly to share data between applications. Of course those applications can be B2B or all Intranet. Or a mix.

The very feature rich text editor Jext uses it. It uses XML in atleast one place I know of and thats a JTree which has different sections on it used to insert stuff into your text, you can use XML to customize what selections you make to insert new text into your document. Its a great programmers editor.
http://www.chez.com/powerteam/jext/
Frank

paul we use xml to send trade messages around the world.the xml is sent on an mq-series que.

My most recent XML project has been related to LANWrights courseware that we use to teach on-line classes. Over the years this has gone through several redesigns and accumulated a lot of weird format initialization files.
I am having great success putting these initialization parameters into a single XML document. Advantages are:
1. Single document - everything for a given course can be found in one file. It is also easy to write in comments to document fields.
2. Dynamic lookup - instead of setting a parameter on startup and being unable to change it, I keep the DOM in memory and look the parameter up as needed! That makes it dynamically modifiable either by online change to the DOM or by forcing a read of a new XML file.
Other XML projects -
The next generation of my testing applet will read an XML script
I have a news page that I hope to integrate into the site at: http://www.lanw.com/books/javaxml/netnews.jsp
A client of mine is using XML to produce annotation for legal documents.
Bill

Paul,
Our multi-tiered application was completely developed utilizing XML technology. XML templates are stored on the server(we use Netscape Enterprise Server) and after call was generated we use XSL (plus some embedded Javascript for different programming purposes)files to generate HTML on the fly. Works perfectly(even though we needed some additional Java Controllers calls to see if it's being generated correctly. It's a little bit of overhead.)
--Alex

I use XML for various uses in most of my projects. Also, Tomcat uses XML for its configuration files, as does NetBeans. Ant is very XML dependant.
It is wide spread and very useful.
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Chris Stehno (Sun Certified Programmer for the Java 2 Platform)