We focus a lot on creating, editing, validating, and displaying XML documents, but one thing you don't hear much about is transporting those documents. Much of the usefulness (and hype) around XML relates to its ability to express business data in a self-describing, platform-independent manner. That is all well and good, but for most enterprise business models you need an efficient way to automatically move your XML to the various applications that process it. Add to that the likelihood of these applications existing on different platforms, on different networks, in different geographic locations, and... well, you might have a problem.

The simplicity of XML lends well to transport by any number of existing protocols, but I recommend you consider HTTP. HTTP has found fame in transporting HTML documents between Web servers and browsers, but at its core, HTTP is a simple protocol that doesn't care what kind of data it's transferring from the server. That information can just as readily be XML as HTML. Combine this with the plethora of server-side technologies (ASP, Servlets, etc.) that process HTTP requests, and you've got a great solution for transporting XML.