On Thursday 18 October 2007 11:16:02 Safe Hammad wrote:
It has always amazed me that, considering the prevalence of XML, open source 'industrial quality' XML editors are scarce. I came across one recently at http://xml-copy-editor.sourceforge.net/. I've not had the opportunity to give it a good test drive, but so far it looks promising ...
It would be interesting to find out just how prevalent XML really is. Where is XML really being applied? I always get the impression (though I have no evidence to back this up) that XML has become an industry buzz-word and is discussed with enthusiasm by managers but with skepticism bordering on disdain[1] by IT professionals. The availability of XML tools could (given my clear bias for attempting to strengthen my argument) reflect this dichotomy: Assuming a preference amongst management for commercial (therefore accountable) tools and IT professionals (particularly the more geeky ones) for open source tools, notice how its Microsoft[2] and Oracle[3] who are pushing the most up-to-date XML technologies such as XQuery while open source tools (with the exception of Saxon[4] which, lets face it, is written in Java) and eXist[5] (again, written in Satan's language and not aimed at the business market) are currently sticking to the earlier standards (e.g. libxml, PostgreSQL[6], Xalan/Xerces). (Also note, however, Qt's recent addition[7] of XQuery to its framework. Where does this sit?) Is this because the open source community simply doesn't care about XSLT 2 and XQuery? Certainly Torvalds' famous rant[8] would seem to back this position up. And notice how AJAX is now becoming AJAJ[9].
XML has its place, but I'm not sure its in business information systems.
Cheers, Richard
[1] http://burningbird.net/writing/the-parable-of-the-languages/ [2] http://blogs.msdn.com/mrorke/ [3] http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/xml/xquery/index.html [4] http://saxon.sourceforge.net/saxon7.9/using-xquery.html [5] http://exist.sourceforge.net/ [6] http://developer.postgresql.org/index.php/XML_Support [7] http://doc.trolltech.com/main-snapshot/qtxquery.html [8] http://mail.bitmover.com/pipermail/lmbench-users/2003-November/000076.html [9] http://www.json.org/xml.html