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XML is the future

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Re: XML is the future

#141

Post by yarg »

XML has been around for long enough that a lot of people have developed a tacit understanding of it, it's not reasonable in all cases (I once went to war with an 8000 line build.xml file - fuck everything about that), but for simple cases it's an easy to parse hierarchical format that most people who need to can get a handle on.

But there's one vestigial artefact that irks me.
Why can't I just do this? Validation and highlighting are well past the point where it should be a viable option.

Re: XML is the future

#142

Post by Traubenfuchs »

devjab wrote: 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…

This is not the fault of SOAP/XML at all though? There'd be several ways to offer a soap service that dynamically returns the set of requested fields.

Re: XML is the future

#143

Post by sakopov »

gnulinux wrote: 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…

Around the time Angular came out with v2 and everyone basically realized that they either had to completely rewrite their Angular apps or spend the same effort to migrate to React (which was the new hotness at the time) I really started contemplating whether it's possible to stay sane while keeping up with the pace of change in both back-end and front-end paradigms. I ended up switching from full-stack to back-end dev. I don't know if it's just me, but now it seems like things have started to calm down and we're just iterating on existing problem sets and frameworks rather than throwing everything out and starting over. Does anybody feel the same? I actually think this is the best time to dive back into full stack dev.

Re: XML is the future

#144

Post by tomgp »

yarg wrote: post #141

XML has been around for long enough that a lot of people have developed a tacit understanding of it, it's not reasonable in all cases (I once went to war with an 8000 line build.xml file - fuck everything about that), but for simple cases it's an easy to parse hierarchical format that most people who need to can get a handle on. But there's one vestigial artefact that irks me. Why can't I just do this? Validation and…

I’m not sure, but possible legibility? Like if you have a bunch of nested nodes it’s nice to be able to see where one ends at a glance.

Re: XML is the future

#145

Post by alphager »

devjab wrote: 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…

I think "XML" is way too broad to meaningful discuss anything.

XML the data format is pretty great in its basic form. Not space-efficient, but unless you're dealing with bulk data, the inefficiencies don't matter unless you're googlescale or can't spare a millisecond. The format itself doesn't absolve you from the design work of your model; your ssn example is typical of the "CEO said we have to use XML now" rush-jobs at the peak of the SOA hypecycle.

XML data validation through XSD is a dream. The insistence of the JSON-people to sabotage any kind of data validation is absurd to me.

XML Webservices are easy and consuming them from a WSDL is easy.

SOA on an enterprise level was a stupid idea creating a giant expensive communication middleware with the ESB without delivering on the promises.

Every other thing in the XML space is brainfuck-level overcomplicated bullshit dreamt up by bored enterprise architects. WS-* is a cacophony of overcomplicated solutions to problems that only exist because enterprise architects dreamt of having a single data model that's inter-operable between companies.

Re: XML is the future

#146

Post by anonzzzies »

Gigachad wrote: post #70
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.

Every non-startup wastes incredible amounts on fads and other inefficiencies while still lasting perfectly fine. It's just business as usual. I could probably save my current largest clients many millions/year on dev if the CTO (& his tech leads) wasn't such a fad guy; he basically pops on Twitter every morning and starts sending over 'new stuff the team should look at'. There are 1000s of applications in that company and there is an incredible rot-fighting effort because of the use of the latest and the greatest frameworks. But millions/year is chump-change for this company so it's not happening any time soon. He does deliver, so the perception is that he gets things done; that entire teams are busy just updating 1 year old code dependencies for 0 business benefit is taken for granted.

Re: XML is the future

#147

Post by MawKKe »

yarg wrote: post #141

XML has been around for long enough that a lot of people have developed a tacit understanding of it, it's not reasonable in all cases (I once went to war with an 8000 line build.xml file - fuck everything about that), but for simple cases it's an easy to parse hierarchical format that most people who need to can get a handle on. But there's one vestigial artefact that irks me. Why can't I just do this? Validation and…

why not go further, why can't we just write

  
    
  >
although now that ="foo" business seems too noisy. how about

  
    
  >
also, those angle brackets are too pointy, let's swap them to something more pleasant

   (tree
     (leaf :colour green)
     (leaf :colour yellow))

Re: XML is the future

#148

Post by coldtea »

makeitdouble wrote: post #129
gnulinux wrote: 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…

To give another perspective, at my first job deploying meant sshing into production and execute a make script. It worked 98% of the time, and you'd be having fun the 2% else. It sure wasn't the state of the art, but wasn't something people would yell at you for. We needed windows machine because of corporate policy and remoted into a Solaris box to dev, as a vague replica of production. Fast forward to today, and we…

>Fast forward to today, and we can run a production replica on our local machines at home, the CPU architectures aren't even the same, and code will be deployed through the CI automatically after the tests all pass.

And someone we squandered most of the CPU performance increases in the process, and the super-duper architecture/CI/delivery pipeline fails almost the same percentage of the time, but needs 10x the people to keep it running...

Re: XML is the future

#149

Post by coldtea »

andrewflnr wrote: post #58
hardwaresofton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look I'm not even complaining. But it feels like I'm stuck in a Franz Kafka novel. We just keep changing and changing the same things again and again because that's the new way to do. Big distraction. Destroys your workflow. Forget about all the util scripts you wrote last 6 months being useless. Here's how I stay sane -- I focus on the changes. For the technologies that you noted, here are some good questions that…

I would phrase almost the same idea from the opposite angle: focus on the fundamentals that never change, and view the trends in terms of how they relate to those fundamentals. But also, those are some pretty odd comparisons. For sure Ansible and Terraform aren't directly comparable. If anything they're complementary. Terraform provisions machines (and also infra, etc), and Ansible configures provisioned machines.

>Terraform provisions machines (and also infra, etc), and Ansible configures provisioned machines.

Each of such tools expands to take the role of the other (and also read email)...

Re: XML is the future

#150

Post by BlackFly »

If you want a constructive take on the problem this rant is aimed at (I'm rant happy too, so don't take that description pejoratively), read "No silver bullet" by Fred Brooks, written in 1986. The problem hasn't really changed over time. I think the past four decades have proven his point.

This is the article that highlighted the idea of accidental complexity and essential complexity. Then he points out that the hard problem is making incremental improvements to how we handle essential complexity and that there is no silver bullet. Nothing will ever give you an order of magnitude improvement.

So the corollary here is that if you want an order of magnitude improvement, you will need multiple incremental improvements. You need to make seven 10% improvements to double your efficiency and you need 24 to obtain 10x. An excellent student solves problems correctly 95% of the time, or makes a mistake 1 time in 20. So that excellent student who becomes an engineer may make a mistake 1 time in 20. Not everyone will be so accurate, many of the fads which have promise may be dead ends as well: it might not be possible to increment on them.

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