Service providers have expressed a need for a simple, standard method of building tools for network management and provisioning. The Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides a straighforward means by which these needs can be met. Using standard tools, XML can be easily parsed, stored, retrieved, debugged, and documented. XML's ASCII encoding lends itself well to scripting and provisioning (it's easy to write, and easy to debug), and its ability to provide forward and backward compatibility makes it a robust choice for building network management tools.

This talk will include a very brief introduction to XML, a description of areas of network management to which XML is applicable, and examples of using XML and XML-based tools to wrangle operational and configuration data from a network.

About the Presenter
Rob Enns works on user interface and network management software at Juniper Networks. Prior to Juniper Rob worked at Berkeley Networks and FORE Systems.