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XML is the future

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Re: XML is the future

#61

Post by devjab »

I worked a decade in public sector digitalisation in Denmark, where for some reason they still use a lot of SOAP and thus XML. I’m not so against XML in theory, but I hate it in practice.

You’d have these completely over engineered solutions where you’d basically need to call a separate micro services for every “field” of anything. So if you wanted a name, a ssn, and, an address for a citizen you’d need to make several calls. We ended up buying an API for the APIs, but that is besides the point I’m trying to make. The point is that it was very designed, but the XML. Well… you’d have things like:

123 and worse. And it’s like, why would they spend all that time designing micro-service and data architectures and then output really inconsistent and often even standards breaking XML? But I know why, because out of the maybe 300 different systems to output XML that I’ve worked with over the years, none of them did it “right”.

If the future is XML then we better step up our game!

Re: XML is the future

#62

Post by bradley13 »

Great, if cynical article. If you have a company that chases fads, you need to work for a better company. Find one where the older developers aren't 30-something. Usually, gray hair brings a certain immunity to fads.

Re: XML is the future

#63

Post by espe »

it is easy to paint XML as anachronistic, and as crude serialization format it certainly is. but as many analogies, that only goes so far. there is still the excellent tooling (XSLT, DTD, schematron..) and the fact that there are elaborate data modeling use cases still using it because there is nothing that comes close to that combination of expressivity and tooling. take for example the TEI: https://tei-c.org you could do it with OWL or UML of course, but would you, really? in some ways we haven't really explored the possibilities of data modeling. there is things that json+some schema will never be able to do.

ps: i enjoyed the article.

Re: XML is the future

#64

Post by dheera »

deaddodo wrote: post #56
pyeri wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the AJAX technology was initially sold as "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". Today, it's most common to send AJAX requests from frontends and most of them have nothing to do with XML data, but funny how that acronym still stays till today!

The original XMLHttpRequest introduced in Microsoft's IE was intended to transport XML messages from a backend to a frontend, since JSON didn't exist at the time. Realistically, originally it was just used to directly inject blobs of html into the page. Ajax just referred to utilizing that feature along with JavaScript's async functionality to create dynamic webpages. It wasn't really a technology, and I've very rare…

I had the equivalent of XMLHttpRequest LONG before XMLHttpRequest existed, back in the IE4 days. I did it by creating a tiny iframe with the target URL and then retrieving its contents. Never mind that I could also read users' hard drives, but I had AJAX long before AJAX was launched.

Unfortunately there was a period of time when Microsoft patched the security issues with iframes and that was no longer possible, but it was fun for a while to have a taste of the future.

Re: XML is the future

#65

Post by pwdisswordfishc »

preommr wrote: post #30

It's easy to just mark XML off as one of the many fads in tech given how many there are. But I think it's much more worthwile to dive into the particulars of why it failed. While they're all fads, some of them share commonalities that, in hindsight, I think we can say were major catylsts to their downfall. With XML, it failed because something like JSON was much simpler. Time and time again I see people saying that j…

And specifically XHTML failed for two reasons: (0) Internet Explorer did not support it, and (1) there was no good migration path out of tooling that generated HTML by unrigorous string concatenation.

So instead WHATWG created HTML5, which bastardized well-designed (if clunky to use) XML features like namespaces, paving the way for vulnerabilities like CVE-2020-26870.

Re: XML is the future

#66

Post by otherme123 »

pyeri wrote: post #55
noduerme wrote: post #16

I really love this review of the past 20 years. It gets to the heart of the hype/FOMO cycle that's driven so many of these stacks to short-lived superstardom, and then quickly into irreversible technical debt. I have never really understood this. My favorite comment I ever got on a coding board when I was debating the pros and cons of building my next project in the trendy platform of the day was >> STFU, go out and…

I wouldn't call XML entirely a hype or FOMO, it has become part of what we call the modern web even today. 1. The very language that websites are written in today (HTML5/XHTML) are nothing but XML dialects. 2. React's JXS language which many sites use today is also an XML dialect. 3. RSS and ATOM standards used to publish your blog or website feeds are XML standards. 4. JSON replaced XML only as an efficient transpor…

Rss/Atom feels like a case of Querty keyboard. https://www.jsonfeed.org/ would be a better choice, but only a few readers implement it, and a lot of frameworks has Rss/Atom by default with a click.

As you explain in (4), Xml makes sense for complex data, but feeds are basically in their final version.

Re: XML is the future

#68

Post by lastyearmodel »

rqtwteye wrote: post #15
lastyearmodel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely anecdotally, but the most productive I've ever been in a company has been was a company in 2016-2019 who was on a monolith .ENT Framework with no kube/container setup at all. Sure, it felt like absolute chaos some days, but I"ve never felt more productive and in a flow as then, mainly because we weren't chasing the latest and greatest thing but focusing on what's working for us and perfecting it.

The sad thing is that in many cases working on such a system is a career killer. Nobody wants to hire you. Some years ago a colleague and I realized that our company wouldn’t hire us judging from the job descriptions because we worked on systems that had been working for years but weren’t shiny. Since then I always something new to every project. Not because it makes sense but because it’s good for the resume. Other…

I can only talk from my limited experience. The company I mentioned was my first workplace outside of university, and since then more than doubled my salary. So I don't think of it as a career killer, but instead a stable environment to get yourself skilled up in what it's _actually_ like in a dev role.

Re: XML is the future

#69

Post by noduerme »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #27
noduerme wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this impulse to constantly experiment with everything too. And I think it's healthy for your brain to always be learning new ways and testing your preconceived notions of how you do things. A lot of times it leads to incremental advances, either in the next iteration of my existing code or the way I approach my next project. But a lot of it, I can admit, boils down to sheep shaving. When you start figuring out…

> But a lot of it, I can admit, boils down to sheep shaving. AKA Yak shaving[0], which I am... unashamedly fond of doing >> There are yaks to shave all over the stack, and I go where the yaks are. (quote is from my github readme) > When you start figuring out how you'd implement codebase 2009 in stack 2023, and then actually doing it, that's golf. It's all good, it's educational, but it's downright immoral to sell th…

My idea of a major overhaul for a client is upgrading from Mysql 5.7 to 8 with no downtime and then slowly, over a year, finding queries that could be sped up with lateral subqueries or window functions. That's about the pace, and it's effective at keeping resource use in check. The wilder things I experiment with on the side are once in awhile actually useful for a new app or service...

I basically agree with you, if the cost of building the code will be easily outweighed by the savings to the client and I also think the platform will hold them for the next 10 years, I'll pitch it [e.g. I've moved many early clients from my servers over to AWS services when it made sense, and still maintain them]. But it's easy to see too how if I were trying to constantly drum up more work, it would be seductive to pitch them on new hyped up technologies they don't need, just to remain relevant and keep the checks flowing. I think that's the animating force behind all of this platform churn, not excited developers who just want to sheep or yak-shave (thanks. I always forget which ruminant I'm shaving ;)

Re: XML is the future

#70

Post by Gigachad »

ArunRaja wrote: post #11

There should be a threshold to adopt new technology, with dead focus on the deliverables. Chasing the fad is endlessly tiring and costly.

There is. It's called "the market". A company that wastes too much time and money on non returning investments will not last.
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