Re: Xquery might have some things right

"Corey Brown" <corey_at_spectrumsoftware.net> wrote in message news:Se02c.16672$JN2.13942_at_bignews4.bellsouth.net...
>
> "Eric Kaun" <ekaun_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:dn%1c.55833$1O4.38437_at_newssvr33.news.prodigy.com...
> > "Corey Brown" <corey_at_spectrumsoftware.net> wrote in message
> > news:gZ_1c.46418$0l1.21653_at_bignews3.bellsouth.net...
> Sure, that's why you need an AAIS (application to application
interface specification),
> otherwise how will you define the contract between one system and the
other?

Definitely - my point was that XML doesn't absolve you of that responsibility.

> XML does have "some" advantanges. Here's a short list:
>
> - It's human readable. Developers can visually check on communications
between systems
> simply by taping into the communications channel. Great for
debugging too.

Recently I've been dealing with comma-delimited data being sent from one system to another. I find it no less readable than some of the XML docs I cope with at work. In some simple, short cases, you might be right, but for a system of any sophistication, I find the format tedious. I still need a tool (like XMLSpy) to cope with the inevitable removal of line breaks from XML streams - I can't read those things in one big block. And if I have to open a tool, well, many tools will work. XML is fine for writing short docs in a text editor - after that, things get hairy.

> - Senders and receivers don't have to be in perfect sync. That is,
information can be added
> at the transmitter that the receiver can simply ignore. This works
especially well in a publish
> subscribe scenario where the subscribers use the published output
in different ways.

That's true of my comma-delimited data too. I have a line with field names. It's trivial to suck the data and field names into Perl and get a nice hash of field to value, and trivial to only grab the ones you care about. All with less code than typical XML-related code (even with a parser!).

I'm not advocating comma-delimited, by the way - just mentioning that I've yet to see many of the stated benefits of XML materialize for me.

• erk