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XML is the future

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331–340 of 408 posts

Re: XML is the future

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

news flash: You are working in exactly the same place.. it is just 5 years later :-) All that outdated technology you mention, was probably introduced as the newest-cant-live-without at some earlier time.

So how old does the tech need to be?

The hype train never stops! The golden ticket is for the front cabin but ideally you are driving it.

Re: XML is the future

#332
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…

IMO XML failed because of mismatch between programming language structures and storage format. JSON is perfect because it maps 1:1 to arrays and objects. XML does not. There were whole ORM projects to map XML to data structures. That's a fundamental issue and replacing XML was not that hard. My prediction is that SQL will fail too. There are infinite attempts to dethrone it. And the reason is the same: tabular data d…

To dethrone SQL, you won't cut it with just average techbro hype. You need the top award of SIGMOD renamed in honor of your paradigm's inventor levels of hype.

Re: XML is the future

#333
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s another perspective: A decade ago you could deploy an internal PHP app to a box and forget about it for a few years, then fix a minor bug by sshing in, viming a file, and hacking it a few times. These days, if you leave the app untouched for six months that 10 minute fix becomes 2 hours of fixing a broken docker build. :)

>then fix a minor bug by sshing in, viming a file, and hacking it a few times. Yeah, screw version control! Who needs any record of the change you made? If you have to move the code or redeploy it somewhere because that server goes down or something else changes, _real_ 10x rockstar ninjas remember every change they've made for the last several years.

Not to mention the paper trail needed for any meaningfully regulated industry. The thought of someone just ssh'ing into an application with access to PII or HIPAA regulated data and being able to tweak the production code is nightmare fuel.

Re: XML is the future

#334
I started coding in C++ back in the 90s. The secret is, if you wait long enough, things become popular again. Thanks to webassembly, I can code fast web apps in C++. And of course webassembly is just a hybrid of a java like runtime + ActiveX.

Fashion has cycles!

Re: XML is the future

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

news flash: You are working in exactly the same place.. it is just 5 years later :-) All that outdated technology you mention, was probably introduced as the newest-cant-live-without at some earlier time.

So how old does the tech need to be?

The older the better.

The better understood, both in capability and limitation.

The better chance no new updates will break it.

The better chance no new updates.

The better you get to know it.

The better you get to integrate it.

The better the chance it will be there tomorrow too.

The better the investment learning it becomes.

Re: XML is the future

#336
post #117
post #7

I've been working in the tech industry in the US for about 5 years. Ever since I knew myself I've been coding. From middle school to high school, given any problem, like Sudoku, or keeping up daily chores, my solution was Programming! Programming wasy homebase. Then I studied it in uni, thought I was kinda good at it, and loved it. But when I started working in the industry, I realized that it's absolutely exhausting…

Yeah, you can't jump on every hype. I started in web dev almost 20 years ago (did some Visual C++ before that). First job was everything XML. We had our open source CMS that stored all documents as XML and used XSLT to transform it into the HTML we needed. Was pretty cool, but there's always something that didn't fit that paradigm. Some coworkers went a bit overboard and used XSLT to generate the XSLT to create the H…

Somewhere out there in the known universe theirs cobalt developers that have avoided CSS, SOAP, Oracle J2EE, reactivesvelteinangularvue's, javascript servers, shitty facebook ideas, nine thousand line YML files, micro bullshit (microsoft, microservers), "containers" (and solaris zones before that) AND there's nobody pining to replace them with LLM models.

Re: XML is the future

#337
post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an adequate philosophy for like.. a CRUD app, some freemium SaaS, social media, etc. Stuff with millions of users and billions of sessions, etc. However there are industries applying these lessons in HPC / data analytics / things that touch money live .. operating on scales of users in the 10s to maybe 100s. So stuff where downtime is far more costly both in dollars and reputation. I'm also intrigued by the c…

> I'm also intrigued by the constant cloud refrain of "stuff crashes all the time so just expect it to" coming from a background where I have apps that run without crash for 6 months at a time, or essentially until the next release. IMHO, those aren't mutually exclusive. Your app code should be robust enough to run 6+ months at at time, and the "stuff crashes all the time so just expect it to" attitude should be rese…

Right, which is why I think brushing aside actually monitoring basic hardware stats that are leading indicators of error rates / API issues / etc makes no sense.

Re: XML is the future

#338
post #61

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 sever…

Not in Denmark only. In some projects across the EU I only saw XML/SOAP used for the so called API access. I really do not understand the XML fetish still going on in 2020+.

I’m (and many others) are using XML via the PreTeXt[1] project. Because of the strict schema, the processors are able to transpile from xml source to LaTeX/pdf, HTML, epub, and more. The syntax is obnoxious, but I love the results!

[1]: https://pretextbook.org/doc/guide/html/part-author.html

Re: XML is the future

#339
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…

IMO XML failed because of mismatch between programming language structures and storage format. JSON is perfect because it maps 1:1 to arrays and objects. XML does not. There were whole ORM projects to map XML to data structures. That's a fundamental issue and replacing XML was not that hard. My prediction is that SQL will fail too. There are infinite attempts to dethrone it. And the reason is the same: tabular data d…

> My prediction is that SQL will fail too...And the reason is the same: tabular data does not map well to our data structures.

The whole point of SQL is that relations and relational data are not data structures. They are higher level concepts and data structures are implementation details. The reason it has survived 4+ decades is because it isn't intrinsically tied to those implementation details and instead can be reimplemented over and over and over.

> There are infinite attempts to dethrone it.

Viewed another way, there are infinite attempts to reinvent it, all of which keep failing, because they aren't as good.

Re: XML is the future

#340
It (or maybe a new version of it) is the future. But people got bored and justiably frustrated in how clunky it is, because it can be and do everything. As often happens, people started abandoning it just as it was getting really interesting - w3c xlink, the hypertext/data document of our dreams, and we're not talking about some neato mostly-great thing someone came up in popular language, rather a set of precise standards with implementations in every language. But in its era, the current "get er done/yagni" startup culture was really kicking in as people realized it was a hassle and less immediately rewarding to think of the web as a standards based platform past using the browser as a client.
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