See the OmniMark Developers Resources website for more about OmniMark.

OmniMark Overview

OmniMark has evolved to become a single, integrated content processing platform which features a wide range of connectivity and integration capabilities - making it possible to process content from any source and to deliver precisely-tailored information, on demand, to everyone who needs it. Increasingly this means streaming content into other applications, where people are performing specialized tasks in specialized environments.

Organizations today have come to appreciate the need to handle content with this level of confidence and precision and the one question becomes how best to achieve this goal. With OmniMark, there is one tool that can make it possible. And whereas patchwork solutions, constructed from a mixture of emergent or single-purpose tools, are frequently attempted, it is OmniMark, a proven and mature technology, that consistently delivers.

With respect to the rapidly changing landscape of content processing tools, many of which are excellent for specific purposes, OmniMark takes an inclusive posture. The OmniMark Architecture is consciously oriented towards connecting with, leveraging and coordinating whatever services that specialized tools or enterprise applications can provide. In this way, production-strength content processing applications, which are exactly matched to the business requirements, can be designed, built and managed.

The OmniMark Architecture

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Connectivity and Integration

Broad connectivity and communication options allow OmniMark to interact with other applications via application program interfaces (APIs) and user interfaces. Most major networking protocols are supported, including TCP/IP, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and mail (POP3 and SMTP). Data sources and sinks may be accessed transparently via URLs, whether they are on a local machine, corporate network, or public internet. In addition, OmniMark supports sophisticated high-level database access via ODBC and XQuery. It has full support for the native Oracle Call Interface, including support for Oracle 9i and 10g. It also includes directory connectivity via LDAP. Specialized interfaces have been added specifically to enable new types of enterprise applications with these taking the form of connectors built for MQSeries and Documentum. OmniMark functionality can be extended through its SDK to support other emerging protocols and specific APIs.

Web Services Support

OmniMark Web Services Broker is a scalable, message-driven component supporting XML-RPC and client-specific protocols. The Web Services Broker builds on OmniMark's underlying communications abilities to enable existing or new OmniMark applications to be directly supported as a web service. These are activated via SOAP, XML-RPC or the emerging Representational State Transfer (REST) protocol. The broker interprets and routes web services requests and can host the set of applications that service those requests. It is straightforward to implement, and incorporates user-configurable load balancing/flow control logic which allows end user tuning to meet specific application or environment needs.

Integration with Java and .NET

OmniMark is fully integrated with Java technologies and can be incorporated into a Java application server, built into a standalone Java application or made accessible through a managed bean interface and Java Management Extensions (JMX). OmniMark can be managed in the same way as other Java resources, using all the mechanisms available in these sophisticated architectures, enabling OmniMark to be easily deployed for complex applications using distributed processing within a networked or clustered environment. OmniMark can also be integrated into the .NET environment as an ActiveX component and managed from within that environment.

Cross Platform Capability

OmniMark applications will run on many platforms including Windows, UNIX and Linux. The byte-code files can be compiled on one platform and run unchanged on others. The abstraction layer used to accomplish this allows OmniMark to be enabled on new platforms and new versions of operating systems extremely rapidly, which ensures organizations can upgrade applications with minimal disruption and delay.

Multilingual Support

For applications handling multiple character sets and Unicode, OmniMark allows the business logic to be completely decoupled from the minutiae of character set, and individual character, handling that so often makes implementing full multilingual support a costly, time-consuming, and error-prone task.

Open Standards

The ability to seamlessly combine pattern-based text and data processing with structured markup parsing allows developers to create powerful hybrid applications that are uniquely effective in moving amongst these domains. When it comes to XML, OmniMark 8 supports both well-formed and schema-based parsing, being equipped with both a built-in XML parser and an interface to external parsers. SGML is fully supported, a fact that has proven to have resilient merits, and this support includes the latest amendments to the standard that were made to accommodate the adjustments needed by XML. OmniMark supports the W3C XML Schema via an External Parser Interface (EPI). The EPI also allows other types of XML Schema to be directly supported in OmniMark's Markup Processing domain, including non-XML or customer-specified XML protocols. An XSLT processor is integrated for performing specific markup processing tasks or when working with small XML instances and applying multiple views to the same content.

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