I read a blog post by Brennan Spies entitled “XML Backlash”. This post summarized some of the anti-XML sentiment I have been hearing for some time in the industry. I thought this would be a relevant topic since I just completed a training course in XML myself.Brennan offered that XML was introduced in 1998. XML has a complementing set of other technologies such as XPath, XSLT, XQuery, and XML Schema. XML is used for configuration and enterprise applications. It is also at the heart of AJAX.
There are other technologies competing with XML. These include Protocol Buffers, JSON, and YAML. Protocol Buffers is a format designed and heavily used by Google. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a simple text based format that is actually language independent. YAML strangely stands for YAML Ain’t a Markup Language.
XML does have its benefits. It is both platform and language independent. There are many tools available to work with XML. I personally plan on getting my company to buy me a copy of XMLSpy from Altova. Although some developers on my team say that Visual Studio is enough. XML is surprisingly readable. Another person taking training when I did told me she thought XML was pretty easy to read. I guess she had not done XSLT yet. Finally XML does have the whole XML Schema language for validation.
One of the main complaints about XML is that it is overly verbose. That translates into big files. What I found interesting about the blog post that I read were the comments from other people. Some said that XML is good, but not good for everything. Another pointed out that XML is good in that it is web friendly. I found it interesting that many people agreed that file in CSV format were most common.
The thing I do know is that XML is in my future. We are going to be receiving some input files in XML format next year. This is a requirement dictated to us by our customer. Apparently this change is part of a modernization effort. You have to understand that we deal with big legacy systems at my work. They are mainly COBOL programs that run on the mainframe. So XML might by new in that light. I will keep you posted on how our project is doing with introducing XML to it. There is one piece of good news. One of my buddies on the project was planning to leave for another project. However he is thinking about sticking around and handling the XML upgrade.
