Background
XML
XML is the eXtensible Markup Language, a way of encoding data in a file with markup that explains to readers what the data represents.
...
Systems that interface with eLandings can generally continue to use an outdated schema if they do not use data elements contained in a newer schema. While the eLandings development team recommends that all interfacing systems keep up to date on schema versions, we recognize that it can be difficult or inconvenient to update interface code in a timely manner. The eLandings system supports the use of legacy versions of the schema. The system upgrade automatically upgrades incoming data to the current version of the schema automatically.
...
| Note | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
While the eLandings system provides backward compatibility to prior schema versions as a convenience to users and interfacing systems, support for prior versions is limited. Support for a particular schema version is limited to one year after it is superseded. While in many cases, older versions of the schema will still be usable, no support for issues with versions of the schema more than a year out of date should be expected. In particular, pre-existing bugs with older version of the schema will not necessarily be fixed if they are found and reported. Such bug fixes will almost always require upgrading to a currently supported version of the schema. While in most cases prior versions of the schema will be supported for a year, regulation changes imposed by the North Pacific Fishery Management Council or other agencies may have shorter implementation timeframes. In such cases, the regulatory timeframe will take precedence and interfacing systems will need to upgrade to the current schema version. Such occurences occurrences are rare, but not unknown. |
...
XML is very much an IT standard, and many tools are available for reading and writing XML documents, and for extracting from XML documents the component data.
JAXB
The eLandings development team uses JAXB from Sun Microsystems for working with XML documents in Java.
Visual Studio
The Visual Studio integrated development environment from Microsoft includes tools to read an XML schema and provide programatic access to documents created from that schema.