The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition has used a self-developed XML variant called Market Data Markup Language for more than two years. Creating a standard, open framework enabling data to stream across company boundaries and multiple platforms will benefit the entire financial industry. Originally built by the company's Philadelphia data center, Cofax has become a cornerstone of KnightRidder. Unlike static HTML documents, Cofax dynamically updates content across multiple sites. Cofax is significant because it was developed using the open-source approach and the Java programming language.
Open source allows programmers to read, modify and redistribute source code.
Everybody gets to understand how the system works. It also makes it more attractive for other newspapers to embrace the system because they know that they're not tied to just the few people who built it. Pant says several newspapers outside Knight Ridder are interested in adopting Cofax. The decision to go it alone was prompted in part by the difficulty of adapting commercial products, according to Pant. What we found was that with all the effort required to purchase something and configure it to meet all our needs, it was actually less work to build it ourselves.