1. Question 2<br />What is XML and service – oriented architecture? Discuss how they are used to support supply chain technology improvement. <br />Extensible Markup Language or XML is a simple and flexible text format derived to transport and store data. XML is used to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing as it is capable of carrying information, not displaying what sort of information. <br />Service – Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to building software systems that has evolved from distributed computing. Distributed computing is a model in which the processing of the application is split over a number of computer systems. SOA have self-describing interfaces in platform-independent XML documents and communicate with messages formally defined via XML Schema (also called XSD). The important feature of SOA is their loosely coupled nature where the service interface is independent of the implementation. A simple example would be an application in which one computer implements an order-taking web application, supporting the web browser, but another computer implements a part catalog lookup function, and the first computer “asks” the second for lookups when needed. In this example, part catalog lookup is a “service” which can be “requested” or “invoked”. <br />The obvious benefit of an enterprise employing SOA and XML is that the company could create a supply chain composite application using a set of existing applications that expose the functionality via standard interfaces. The opportunity to carry out more business-specific or customer-specific processes, rules, scenarios, and ways of responding to exception conditions will change, because instead of being restricted to standard policies that are applied across the application, the company or the employees are focusing on ones that use different services for different customers. Likewise, it will be possible to provide more flexibility within Supply Chain processes, such as performing more ad-hoc requests for analysis on demand. SOA protects IT infrastructure investments as it allows enterprises to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a granular fashion to address the new business requirements, provides the option to make the services consumable across different channels, and exposes the existing enterprise and legacy applications as services. The evolution of connectivity that is empowered by SOA will allow more connections to content within and outside the enterprise. <br />