Re: XML's place in the world

On Nov 12, 2009, at 10:03 AM, Kurt Cagle wrote:
>
> Something that I think it worth noting is that for all the volubility of the AJAX crowd, JSON messaging is no longer really gaining traction against XML messaging, and may actually be shrinking. Admittedly, I'm biased in this regard, but I think as AJAX itself matures and toolkits become more "enterprise hardened" (and as RESTful services become more dominant), the mismatch between XML and JSON at the business level is a fairly significant impedance barrier to pervasive adoption.

The client-side crowd is vastly more interested in JSON than XML. XML comes up because the client-side dev was forced to use. Rarely would it be the first choice of data exchange between the server(s) and client.

I see it trending to offering multiple options. I like the Jersey and JAXB for this reason. I used to think jaxb was too brittle, but lately have been appreciating all the time it saves with generating the source code to enabling easy rendering of different content types.

http://server.com/path/to/resource.xml
http://server.com/path/to/resource.json

can use the same class and method to handle the request with me providing the code like:

return Response.ok().entity(someBean).build();

That being said, I would really love a standards based way of knowing what conversion between XML and JSON structures would provide across all the tools that do that type of thing.

best,
-Rob