Software technologies for future telecommunications systems

The telecommunications industry is in a period of tremendous change driven by an increasingly open market, and the phenomenal growth of the Internet. The World Wide Web increasingly influences users' perceptions and applicati on requirements. The challenge for software developers is to shorten develo pment times without any loss of quality. This article discusses two softwar e technologies, components and extensible markup language (XML), which are being used in large-scale distributed systems, and highlights potential ben efits in the rapid development of robust future applications.