Comment by geonik
11 years ago
Those who rant about XML and XSLT know nothing about what they talk about. 50% of our server's behavior (200,000 Java LOCs) is orchestrated declaratively by a small number of XML files that use around 30 custom namespaces. These are
1. parsed on server startup for setting up persistence, business rules, REST endpoints etc
2. transformed by XSLT to a) produce nice HTML documentation, including DOT class diagrams b) generate Java source code c) validate declaration integrity and cross-referencing
With the right XSDs, IDE support is excellent (auto complete for everything). Take the time to learn it, apply it according to your needs, and reap the benefits- in the long run, maintenance work is down by an order of magnitude.
I'm afraid your argument of "It worked for us" and "it only uses a small number of files with 30 custom namespaces" pretty much is the most unconvincing argument I've ever heard.
In fact, the latter point is one of the reasons most people like to avoid XML.
"the latter point is one of the reasons most people like to avoid XML"
And these are exactly those who will never "get" that XML is much more than a data container for tree-like structures. They should stick to JSON or CSV for that matter.
Yeah XML namespaces are a pain to work with, but when it comes to stuff like documentation it's hard to beat XML.
Mixed content in Json is definitely not as simple as it is in XML.