Re: funny article

Jan Hidders wrote:
> That there would be very little in terms of results is simply complete
> nonsense.

I am on the side of the customer (having to implemented systems with or without XML) am always right :) So I beg to differ.

I mean it'll be 10 years soon, and you don't have a data model. And when you'll have it you'll have it with all the deficiencies inherited by design from previous ad-hoc committees.

That's what it is: ad-hoc committees, see Xml Schema Definition language   and related. I don't think I need to remind you of all the crap that you are forced to suck it up to. The best proof of that is that in publishing your papers you don't want to go near an XSD, because it just sucks.

So you've got this XSD with type validation problems and with query problems that could have been most likely avoided were it not for premature standardisation. Cause it was first the standard and then the application.

And then there' the all known quote by Phil Wadler in The Essence of XML.

> There have already been very interesting results in both
> theoretical and practical areas, and at the moment this only seems to be
> getting better. Especially, there is some very interesting interaction
> going in between the programming language community and the database
> community which is leading to very new solutions and addressing problems
> that weren't getting much attention in the past.

Sure, XDuce, CDuce and all kinds of other features that pop up in research prototype level languages and may be implemented in a real language somewhen in 20 years (hopefully XML will be obsolete by then).

In the meantime, you should have a look at real code out there: slow, insecure, buggy using horrendous APIs like SAX and DOM, and now pull paresers and other non-sense, because there's seven way to skin the XML cat and nobody seems to do it right :)

>I've been doing some
> research myself on query optimization and it is very interesting to see
> how differently the two communities tend to approach the same problem.
>

That maybe interesting but doesn't put food on the table. You are workin g to solve problems that maybe interesting as a research areas, but most of them are of your own devise. I.E. they shouldn't have been there in the first place.

Good luck :)

But don't hold it against software engineers who then will not use your research because we may prefer just to avoid the problems rather than deplolying advanced stuff to solve them.

>> I mean a modest software engineer like me, even if I was brainwashed
>> by XML propaganda, I wouldn't be able to use much in the way of
>> building systems. That is after so many years of hype. That is
>> contrast with, say, SQL, which inspite of the theoretical problems,
>> still makes the world go round in many places.
>
>
> In terms of publishing formats, data exchange and file formats XML has
> already made a lot of things much easier than they were and is in that
> sense already making parts of the world go round right now.

Sure, a lot of crappy software out there. The easiest denial of service attack is against a web service built around either a Microsoft or Java parser.

The parts of the world that it moves it does mostly nothing but moves some (structured) bytes from point A to point B. A feature which, from a research perspective, was already solved (albeit differently and more efficiently) more than a decade before this XML business.

> But if the
> systems you build don't involve that, then nobody in my church is
> claiming that you should use XML anyway.
>

Well, some of the systems just have to use XML because of political pressure, especially in having to integrate with outside sources that are just too lazy to think properly or admit to what they are exposed to just by using an XML parser.

But the situation is no different than the years in which sofwtare engineers had to use Cobol or PL/1 because of political pressure. Those ships sank under their own overweigth.

> From the database perspective one cannot really make a judgement until
> XML as a data model is truly and well there, and things have only just
> begun to take shape.

Well, it's kind of late, isn't it ? Dr. Codd had that in the first year. And one just needed to add transitive closure (and maybe higher order operators), and voila, all the expressive power that XML research community is trying so hard to build for years and years.

And just look at the hodge-podge in Oracle or Microsoft extension to SQL to allow for "XML queries", or should I say "XML results" . Now really :) Whom do you expect to be able to deploy such things ? Developers who are smart can understand and think that it's crap, developers who are not that smart, well, they can't comprehend anyways

> The essential component, a query language, is not
> even a finished standard yet and query optimization research and other
> typical database subjects (concurrency, integrity, et cetera) are still
> very much in their infancy.
>
> -- Jan Hidders

Sure, but since many of the assumptions you take for granted are false steps already, the whole construction will be kind of weak.

To quote one E.W. Dijkstra: Beauty is Our Business.

And so far all this XML business is damn ugly (speaking strictly from a mathematical elegance perspective).

Costin Received on Sat Dec 04 2004 - 07:03:23 CET