In my callow youth, I remember being so excited about XML. Ah, how wrong I was. Two articles of interest:
The End Of The Road For Web Services
Web services as a strategy was fundamentally flawed in my view because it was so un-web. It took an idea that hardly worked on an Intranet – remote manipulation of tightly-specified objects – and tried to make it work on the Internet. It led to software applications that by default were complex, brittle and heavy. Although I know many brilliant software engineers who worked unexpected miracles with Web Services, implementation by the common corporate programmer was stodgy in every case I heard about. In the end Web Services became an intranet tool for most uses, rendering the “W” incorrect even if WS* will be with enterprise developers for years to come as a kind of architectural COBOL.
and
It’s “Yay”, because for important use cases JSON is dramatically better than XML. In particular, JSON shines as a programming language-independent representation of typical programming language data structures. This is an incredibly important use case and it would be hard to overstate how appallingly bad XML is for this. The fundamental problem is the mismatch between programming language data structures and the XML element/attribute data model of elements. This leaves the developer with three choices, all unappetising
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So what’s the way forward? I think the Web community has spoken, and it’s clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON. XML isn’t going away but I see it being less and less a Web technology; it won’t be something that you send over the wire on the public Web, but just one of many technologies that are used on the server to manage and generate what you do send over the wire.
In the short-term, I think the challenge is how to make HTML5 play more nicely with XML. In the longer term, I think the challenge is how to use our collective experience from building the XML stack to create technologies that work natively with HTML, JSON and JavaScript, and that bring to the broader Web developer community some of the good aspects of the modern XML development experience
Having in recent memory been involved in a SOA deathmarch project (still in the process of tumbling down to inevitable failure), and dealing daily with the issues of transferring data using XML, I can firmly say: good riddance.
What do we do now? We do JSON. Why do we do JSON? Because the JSON object model (and the implicit RESTful JSON API model) is almost an exact match for how programmers – especially those of languages such as Python, Ruby & JavaScript – think about data .