11–20 of 113 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, if people think XML has aged poorly, wait until these schema-less formats age...
Ha! ... that’s a laugh of bitter jealousy. I’ve dealt with XML, but I’ve never with XML that came with a schema, or which would have reliably followed one. Not saying schema-less formats are great, but at least I can eyeball them to see what is going on.
I really doubt that AWS is using libvirt. They almost certainly have their own abstraction. But still, I agree that libvirt is great; I wrote about it here: http://catern.com/posts/libvirt.html
Indeed it’s 2020 and yet to see any major open source work from Amazon (which has benefited a lot from open source itself using Perl, CPAN, C, Java, Linux etc.). In this respect IBM, google, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple are far better. Here even Oracle fare better due to acuisition of MySQL and sun microsystems.
I believe the major contribution from amazon might be hiring some of the open source developers to build proprietary systems. Those developers in spare time or weekends continue their open source project, but I do not have any study or articles on it.
Based on my information in 2013, amazon built their cloud using Xen hypervisor and related tools and libraries. Libvirt is one of the key libraries providing beautiful abstractions and language bindings to manage xen on Linux node at that time.
It will be nice if you can point to code from Amazon on low level library like Libvirt for cloud computing.
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…
JSON is a bad configuration format simply for the fact that it doesn't support comments. Some parsers do but most don't. XML for all its verbosity and complexity at least has comments where I can quickly try out configuration changes without needing to save the old configuration somewhere else. Hell, even INI files had support for comments and were just as expressional as JSON. I wonder why we regressed in that regar…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, if people think XML has aged poorly, wait until these schema-less formats age...
Ha! ... that’s a laugh of bitter jealousy. I’ve dealt with XML, but I’ve never with XML that came with a schema, or which would have reliably followed one. Not saying schema-less formats are great, but at least I can eyeball them to see what is going on.
If I saw a schema, which I often didn’t, it usually didn’t say what the author thought it said. To a first order approximation, all the good ones I saw came from one tool (XMLSpy possibly?)
Namespaces ended up in a sort of uncanny valley that I can’t quite do justice to.
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…
What's wrong with XML?
Take an XML document. Validate it.
Take all of the top level elements. Call getElementByID on each with the same value. Combine all the answers into an array, eliminating the nulls.
You might expect that array to have length one or zero on all valid documents. You’d be wrong, and dangerously so for some XML schemas. You can use the same ID on every node and I don’t know of a parser that would balk at that. And yet every implementation will return the first node that has that ID, which will then change any time you descend into the DOM.
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…
What's wrong with XML?
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…
JSON is a bad configuration format simply for the fact that it doesn't support comments. Some parsers do but most don't. XML for all its verbosity and complexity at least has comments where I can quickly try out configuration changes without needing to save the old configuration somewhere else. Hell, even INI files had support for comments and were just as expressional as JSON. I wonder why we regressed in that regar…
For more general data structures, remember that JSON is a true subset of YAML [1]: Switch to a YAML parser and you can start optionally adding comments to your files while still being compatible with legacy input.
[0] https://toml.io/en/ [1] https://yaml.org/
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…
JSON is a bad configuration format simply for the fact that it doesn't support comments. Some parsers do but most don't. XML for all its verbosity and complexity at least has comments where I can quickly try out configuration changes without needing to save the old configuration somewhere else. Hell, even INI files had support for comments and were just as expressional as JSON. I wonder why we regressed in that regar…
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…
It's really quite bad format for how ubiquitous it's become.
While I respect the job that libvirt does (it works — high praise for software), it’s unfortunate that it is also the answer to the question “how can I represent all these virtualized things using XML?”, which was in fashion when libvirt was created. It’s also a bit misleading to characterize cloud providers as building on libvirt. Libvirt is useful as an mostly hypervisor-agnostic wrapper, which is super useful for…
What's wrong with XML?
You could have 45 or you could have . There is often no consistency within a single spec over how this should be done let alone between different specs.
JSON feels much more logical to me as well as being a whole lot simpler. If only it supported comments.