[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Use of XML ?
On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Eric Bohlman wrote: > Because not all cases of data exchange occur between systems over > which one person or group has control. In your example, the transport > format is directly coupled to the internal representation the two > systems use for their data. That's all well and good if the same > people implemented both systems, but it starts to break down if, say, > one of the systems is implemented in Java and the other isn't. XML > comes into play when you want the transport format to be independent > of the internal details of how the data is processed. By adding an > extra layer of abstraction, you decouple the exchange process from the > internal implementation details. There are cases where for > performance reasons you may not want to do this, but you really need > to think carefully about them. There's no real extra layer of abstraction, you could use Java class file declarations (ignoring the method decls) as your schema language and compile stubs in C that read and write serialised objects of that class as structs - nobody ever bothered that I know of, but there's nothing stopping 'em. There are other endpoint-independent data formats that predate XML, too (oh not that debate the XML learnt from SGML that's decades old again, please?!?!? :-) such as XDR and ASN.1 and whatever CORBA uses. XDR: http://RFC.net/rfc1832.html ASN.1 (more complex, but with a "schema language" that puts XML schema to shame, used heavily in telecoms systems): http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/book/index.htm ABS -- Alaric B. Snell http://www.alaric-snell.com/ http://RFC.net/ http://www.warhead.org.uk/ Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software
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