It’s funny, now that google has released their Protocol Buffers, everyone is beginning to see XML is not a one size fits all solution. I am very happy about this. I design and maintain many systems, and any I have made in the past few years have used xml for communication. Not because it was the best idea, or the right idea, but simply because it was buzzword compliant and an easy sell. Now that there are more voices out there saying ‘XML is NOT the way’, this gives me a bit more power to implement things in a simpler way.
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#1 by Bill on July 9, 2008 - 11:04 am
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What is your simpler way? I can appreciate not liking XML in certain instances, but you don’t talk about your alternative.
#2 by admin on July 9, 2008 - 11:27 am
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When we have systems that talk to our server, they register themselves using XML to communicate with the server.
To parse this, despite there being a plethora of libraries for xml available in any language, is still very much overkill.
Protocol buffers provides a way to minimize the data traffic, increase speed, and take out a bunch of the string parsing overhead.
#3 by admin on July 9, 2008 - 11:28 am
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Apparently wordpress parsed out my xml, but my example was:
device: asset_tag=”xxxxxx”
some_property:
Imagine that as xml and that is what that big gap is in the last comment
#4 by Quikee on July 9, 2008 - 12:47 pm
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XML has its advantages: it is universal (platform and language independent), it has well defined data formats (for example standard date/time format notation), it has defined standards for transformation and validation (not ideal but good enough).
Of course it should not be used for everything – it is not the best human readable format (better than binary but for various configuration something like yaml or ini file format might be better suited)
#5 by zen on July 9, 2008 - 12:51 pm
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Nothing personal, but XML *IS* the simplest way to implement things. Well defined, widely known, supported in every language. Of course it’s not always the most efficient way, but still the simplest.
#6 by Roland on July 9, 2008 - 2:57 pm
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So why not get Konqueror to save bookmarks in HTML instead of XML, so I can easily use that HTML file as my home page. The conversion is a pain.
#7 by Aubrey Island on July 9, 2008 - 3:11 pm
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I agree, XML is not the only option, even the best option – But I know it “looks” so delicious to web developers and HTML nutjobs and even those secretaries that end up doing web pages and took an HTML class, something I’ve always liked about XML, which I think, will keep it around for days to come, is it’s a familiar face.
#8 by Ralesk on July 9, 2008 - 3:44 pm
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Hell, it’s about time. I’ve been trying to avoid XML as much as possible, because it’s a true mess to work with. Yes, it’s universal and yes, it can contain anything, but still an unbelievable mess.