They're coming to take me away, ha ha, etc.

[hirez]

I am oddly enthusiastic about the code-bothering possibilities in some enterprise Java middleware. God help all who sail in her.

(The configuration of same is a right lash-up and XML is still the work of satan, mind.)

Comments

[andrewducker]

Sadly, I've yet to encounter something better than XML when it comes to passing structured data.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

I believe that 'Not as bad as EDIFACT' is praise only just faint enough.

XML remains a poor choice as a thing for configuring servers.

[andrewducker]

Key-value pairs are usually good enough for that.

For more complex structures XML does as good a job as I've seen. I try to avoid those though.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

N triples have many better ways to represent them.

The trouble with passing structured data in XML is twofold: First you have to pass it. XML sucks for access to anything outside the current document, which means that it's hard to make something up from composite chunks. If you do, then it's often done by duplicating bits in two separate documents, which has the traditional drawback.

Secondly everything in XML is a tree shape. Much of the real world is graph-shaped instead. Again, the world of black & yellow lycra got it right all those years ago.

You can then also slap ontologies onto this, which allows a lot of useful validation to be done for cheap, by chucking it into an OWL Reasoner. This week I've been trying to make that happen for SVG (hacked into triples first), to see if images are automatically laser-cuttable or not.

[uk-jon.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my sad little world. Will be spending the next 6+ months re-implementing java-based middleware, X12 EDI (and I think some Tradacoms which is many times worse than EDIFACT) and XML integration for Pearson Publishing (the owners of Penguin).

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

I have a sudden urge to rewrite all my Ajax server-end code to generate LISP instead of XML. Somebody must have written a LISP parser in Javascript? I could write all the browser-end code in LISP too. Or mandate that our customers only use Emacs/W3 for all their web access requirements.

I'll blame you if I end up doing any of this. If they let me out again.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I think you're looking for Scala.

Most of the good ideas stolen out of Lisp, deployable through Java so that no-one notices.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Interesting; not really crossed my radar before. There's a shortage of parentheses though, to my mind. Writing as someone who felt more than happy, back in the day, with Algol68's alternate syntactic arrangements. Keywords? Pah.