[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: The Three Myths of XML
I hear you. I have never tried to retrofit pre-XML code to code that uses XML everywhere. All of my XML work has involved new projects or new sub-projects, which is a luxury. I read another email where you said Java serialization works great for you. Dealing with typed data and XML is a pain, especially for floating point values. Will XSD solve this? Will parsers ever support XSD? The answer to both questions is "eventually". For now there's the conversion functions in programming languages such as "atoi" etc. It works but it's tedious. Serialization libraries elminate all of this extra work and therefore is very attractive. Both MFC and Java have their own binary serialization built in. Java's implementation is arguably better -- after all, it was written years later and it works on most platforms. But I don't code in MFC or Java so what choice do I have? XML is the best choice. Being able to create a persistent serialized document with a text editor has been an enormous help. Even basic DTD validation ensures that I'm writing at least semi-correct documents. I have used various binary serialization libraries and I don't enjoy writing code to create a sample serialized document, and I especially don't enjoy having to write all of the persistence code myself (save file/read file). It's trivial to write a XML file to disk and XML APIs let you open a URL quite easily. XML allows me to separate clients from servers a lot more seamlessly, and I don't have to wait for the clients (even if they are stupid test apps) to be finished before I can test my server, because I can just create sample input messages by hand. You also mentioned that you tried using HTTP in your RPC layer and experienced horrible performance. Unless you convert your app to using coarse- grained transactions, this is inevitable. The overhead of HTTP, even with "keep connections alive", is enormous. Again, you must have the luxury of being able to start from scratch, designing everything around a high-latency, low- reliability network. For existing apps that is simply not possible. Even then, RPC is quite viable inside the firewall. I use it all the time in the form of COM+. But almost all developers have come to the conclusion that COM+ and other RPC methods don't work very well over the Internet. Direct socket connections don't so work good (sic) over the Internet. I couldn't disagree with you more about sticking with marking text up. My production apps encode data with XML every minute of every day and XML works great. Is it better than other tried and true methods? I'd say yes, because I can send XML messages to a log file, for example, when an error occurs, so I can investigate the problem later. I actually do that quite often. This is simply pointless when you're using binary serialization libraries. When you use binary serialization you just have to ignore those odd intermittent problems and keep your fingers crossed. If they never happen to you, consider yourself lucky. But does this justify ripping out tried and true methods just for the sake of using XML? Of course not. Without logging, it just takes you longer to find the problem, but you'll find it eventually. If your bosses can't weigh pros and cons, I'd say you're working in hell (most of us are -- you're not alone) and you're justified to be bitter, but it's not XML's fault at all. XML is neither a panacea nor a pariah. Those who advocate XML should only do so when they have real coding experience under their belt. Unfortunately, most of the hot air bags do not. They did the same thing with RPC, and you can bet they'll hype the next technology that comes along. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Alaric Snell" <alaric@a...> To: "The Deviants" <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Monday, June 18, 2001 7:17 AM Subject: Re: The Three Myths of XML Quoting Uche Ogbuji <uche.ogbuji@f...>: > You described Clark's article precisely: "satire". I don't think > there > are many people in positions of dangerous influence who ascribe to the > described "magical thinking". There are... I've been burnt by them. Ever wondered why I'm so cynical about XML? I've had to shoehorn it into situations that it's totally unsuited to. Stick with marking text up! ABS
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