XML has become the language of choice for root manipulation of data.
Its capability to tag data in a meaningful manner, the ability to present this data via CSS or XSL and other means make
the language indispensable in any long term planning for data maintenance, metadata and many other considerations.
XML is used conjointly with any language and is particularly useful when extracting data from a database.
WIth JAVA, PHP, VB, ASP data extracted from a database can be formatted to XML, a format making it portable for any
aniticipated use.
It is natively available in systems such as Oracle or SQL Server.