Microsoft XML

I just subscribed to Microsoft’s MSDN magazine. This month’s issue had a number of references to XML technology. I guess this is a sign that XML is here to stay. The buzzwords I read about were OOXML, XmlLite, and XAML.

OOXML stands for the Open Office XML. It was developed by Microsoft, and is used as the file format for Office 2007 applications. This is not related to the open source OpenOffice applications.

XmlLite is a library for high performance XML applications. It is shipped as a DLL. XmlLite comes with C++ support. You can use it out of the box with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It does not do XML validation (to achieve high performance).

XAML stands for extensible application markup language. It is used a lot in the .NET framework. Specifically it is used in WPF, Silverlight, and WF.

Mashup Markup

There is a new markup language being standardized. It is the Enterprise Mashup Markup Language, otherwise known as EMML. This is an XML language. It employs XPath and XQuery.

EMML is being standardized by the Open Mashup Alliance. This is a group formed last month. It includes names like Adobe, HP, and Intel.

There are some who believe it is too early for such standardization. In the big scheme of things, mashups are new on the web. The jury is still out on this. For more information visit the Open Mashup Alliance on the web.

SOA Maturity Model

It has been a number of years since the Open Group created a working group for SOA. This working group has just published OSIMM, which stands for the Open Group Service Integration Maturity Model. This allows you to measure a company's maturity with respect to SOA. It sounds a lot like the CMMi maturity level for software development.

The top level in the model is SOA with dynamic service composition. And the bottom level is essentially No SOA. Unfortunately I think our project is at the bottom of the heap. We currently do not implement any SOA just yet. There is some talk though. And we will be processing XML input this upcoming year.

The Death of XHTML 2

This semester I am in a web programming class. We are going to learn XHTML. For now I assume that XHTML is HTML adhering to XML standards. A quick scan of my textbook seems to indicate you can just add three lines to your HTML document to make it an XHTL one. We shall see.

It was exciting to see XHTML in the news recently. Well it was exciting until I found that we are about to see the end of XHTML 2. The W3C has decided to pursue HTML 5 instead. I am not sure if this means XHTML in general is dead, or if it is specific to the XHTML 2 specification.

I have head that HTML 5 is not all that exciting. It is a means to combat the rise of competing technologies such as Silverlight and Flash. Apparently Internet Explorer is not supporting all of HTML 5 features. That's a bit of a concern, as I think IE still leads the browser market. Perhaps Microsoft wants to push Silverlight at the expense of their browser. I will check back later when I learn more XHTML in class.

WTF is XML

I often see message board posts asking what exactly XML is. The first Google link will take you to Wikipedia, where the acronym is translated as the Extensible Markup Language. It is defined as a set of rules for encoding documents. Sounds simple enough.

Here is the funny thing. I don't think they teach XML in college. Not even in computer science digress. If it was described in a class, it would be in the Web 2.0 class, which happens to not exist.

Some have called XML a complicated protocol. Others just call it a file type. An easy way of dealing with XML is to use tools to take care of the details. Actually I want to correct my initial statements. The very first link on Google search was a sponsored one by Altova. They were pushing their XML Spy program. I have used it before. Even though it is expensive, it makes XML easier to deal with.

But I digress. XML lets humans read file contents. The files themselves are ASCII text, which get sent over the Internet using the TCP/IP transmission protocol. I have written a whole blog about this subject. We plan to import XML files in our system at work next year. I wanted to purchase a copy of XMLSpy for use at work. However the price tag seems to have given my customer caution. The tool is not more expensive than some of the other software development tools they buy me. However XML is more specialized, and I am not sure I can justify the return on investment.

XML Dedication

Check out this picture for some serious XML dedication. Well it was actually some marketing. I'd call that good marketing. That at least deserves a link. Check out what the CEO of her company has to say about expensive disk storage.

In other news, I have signed up for a college class on XHTML. Now I assume that I am actually going to learn HTML. However the new sexy way to label such learning is XHTML. I paid an arm and a leg for the school textbooks for the course. Chapter 1 tells me XHTML is HTML with three extra lines added at the top of the file. LOL. I bet you can guess what they are talking about.

Be on the lookout for some posts on HTML as I study up in the class.

In Defense of XML

I read a Reddit post defending the creators of the XML standard. This was focused on XML basics. It excluded fringe technologies such as WS-*, SOAP, XML-RPC, and RDF. The author acknowledged that a big part of XML was related standards like XML Schema and XQuery. However he declared that the main point of XML was standardizing a file format and creating a meta language. The best part of the post was the many comments that were received.

First let’s cover the bad. SOAP requests take forever to parse. XML parsing in general seems to be inefficient. It is slow for large data transfer. Most developers do not like XML. This may be due to the APIs like SAX and DOM being horrible.

That is quite a list of bad comments. But each of them, there was a corresponding good comment. XML has been applied to many domains. It is good for large and complex documentation. It is also good for configuration files. Microsoft Visual Studio has a nice XML editor built in. XML is essentially SGML for the web. In other words, it is meant for data transfer.

Initially I thought I would be involved in a new addition to our system that will parse XML input data. However I am finding that I am too busy with other new parts to our system this year. So I have not been as active in my XML studies since my training class ended. It is still nice to read what people in the XML industry have to say about the topic.