Remember the days when On-Line Libraries and databases would rent an entire office block to keep its servers? These servers hosted the entire sets of libraries and books. The more the volumes the more was the space need. Each additional book meant additional server space, just like a book would need more space in a physical rack. The need for such large disk space limited the scalability. Organizations would think twice before converting their entire library. They would restrict themselves to the immediate needs. Reliability of the data became suspect too. Applications became slow as they needed to wind through reams of stored data to run simple queries. These issues stretched beyond data storage and hit content providers like e Learning firms. Organizations could not provide large libraries of e Learning titles on-line as management and reliability of servers was susceptible.

The turn of the century saw the industry experimenting with a new solution, middleware. Many platforms came forth. The simplest and the most powerful that stood out has been XML. Without getting too technical, XML was able to incorporate the concept of breaking the content and data into logical re-usable chunks which are referred through tags. Programs therefore needs to search for XML tags that then re-call the data as and when required. Good efficient programmers are able to re-use common data elements as needed. XML is being used by all common technology platforms for their middle-ware. Be it Flash or .NET or Java. Given the high intensity of some of the complex content elements, XML provides a ready solution to the programming needs of e Learning content and application developers.

(Author Vinay Gupta)