From the Editors: Eschewing XML?
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By SD Times News Team
August 1, 2008 —
The Extensible Markup Language isn’t perfect. Yes, it’s flexible, which makes it great for server-to-server communications. But XML is also verbose and fragile. Transmitting complex XML data can take a lot of bandwidth. Processing complex XML data requires a lot of processing power and memory. That’s why XML is not ideal for server-client communications, particularly when you’re dealing with rich AJAX applications or mobile/wireless devices.
What’s the answer? Well, we’re not sure—but we’re encouraged that companies like Google are studying the problem.
Google’s approach with Protocol Buffers is to create a binary interface definition language that can be compiled by a server, transmitted to the client, and then interpreted locally, using much less bandwidth and client processing power than standard XML. The numbers that Google claims are indeed impressive.
That’s certainly a step in the right direction. However, we are uneasy watching Google go it alone. Sure, Google is a market behemoth, and whatever it does will have far-reaching implications. But the benefit of XML is its universality. If Google succeeds with Protocol Buffers, one could expect notoriously “not invented here” companies like Apple, Microsoft or Sun to develop their own incompatible binary XML formats. Inviting companies such as Adobe, IBM and Nokia to the party would be good as well.
We would encourage Google and the other industry players to collaborate on building an open common binary XML format, which would encapsulate not just binary compression but also IDL-style pre-parsing to simplify the remote computing load.
A tall order? Yes. Getting the players together to solve a common problem won’t be easy. Collaboration isn’t what those companies do best. When you have Microsoft, Sun, Apple and Google all involved in streaming tons of rich information across the Internet to mobile devices, it will be hard to find a table big enough to contain not only technical documentation but also those players’ oversized egos.
Yet, that’s what must happen. The last thing anybody needs is a unilateral protocol stack.
Adding APIs to Windows 7 is the wrong answer
Windows needs new APIs about as much as televised sports need more commercials.
For years now, we’ve heard from Microsoft about how the future of software lies in managed code, but it seems that the company exempts itself from that vision, in a fashion that only the word “hypocrisy” adequately describes.
That’s the most reasonable conclusion one can reach, given that the next version of Windows is understood to have new capabilities that mirror the features of Windows Communication Foundation and .NET Framework 3.5, but in an unmanaged, API-presented form.
The idea for Windows 7 and future releases of the OS should be to reduce the dependency on unmanaged code, instead of adding more gunk to what is already a hairball of truly monstrous proportions. We’d much rather see a commitment to allowing only managed code in a Windows 8 or 9 than consider the prospect of what else can be added to the spaghetti that is the Windows codebase today.
One would think that after the howls of derision directed at Windows Vista, Microsoft would have learned a lesson about how applying lipstick to a pig doesn’t make it any prettier. If anything, doing so creates an even bigger mess.
Unfortunately, like a Third World dictatorship, Microsoft seems incapable of learning from the past. The only good news is that at least nobody will starve or have his or her dignity assaulted. But it makes one ask how the company intends to advance the cause of managed code when it is undermining that effort at the same time.
Related Search Term(s): XML, Windows, Apple, Google, Microsoft
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