RE: XML is _post_ OO

[Jeff Lowery <jlowery@scenicsoft.com>]

After having read your post, I don't think there's much we disagree about.
Perhaps the only bone of contention is whether or not factoring out the data
model is in general a good and useful practice, data sharing or no. What
would be nice is a language that supports data models in conjunction with
object models, and binds the two. Microsoft's .NET skirts close to this, in
that you can (if I recall correctly) annotate datatypes with XML properties,
but the data models themselves appear to be engulfed within the code of the
application.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Brennan [mailto:Michael_Brennan@allegis.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 1:20 PM
> To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Subject: RE: XML is _post_ OO
> 
> 
> > From: Jeff Lowery [mailto:jlowery@scenicsoft.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 11:36 AM
> > [...]
> > I've yet to see
> > a clearly articulated vision of what this post-OO (god, I 
> > hope there's a
> > better name than that) world will look like. What would I, as 
> > a developer,
> > stand to gain by refactoring <buzz> my objects into data model and
> > functional model?
> 
> In most cases, I don't think you'd gain anything. I think 
> that would be a
> step backward. If folks are seriously maintaining that XML makes OO
> obsolete, I would contend that that is absurd, and all 
> evidence points to
> the contrary. If XML makes OO obsolete, then why do we have a 
> DOM? Why do we
> have so many developers and vendors working on data-binding 
> technologies?
> What about the "web services" buzz that is attracting growing 
> developer
> mindshare, and which pushes XML down to an underlying "plumbing" layer
> masked by OO APIs? In the "web services" community, the 
> "post-OO" world
> looks... well, very OO.
> 
> The success of XML does point to one fact that more sensible 
> developers have
> known all along: OO is not a panacea, and does not solve 
> every problem. OO
> just happens to be the best paradigm for software development 
> that anyone
> has come up with, so far. XML hasn't changed that. But OO 
> does not address
> the situation very well in which information needs to be 
> external to an
> application and shared with other applications (which may run 
> on a different
> platform, use a different programming language, have different runtime
> libraries available, etc.). It also does not deal, very well, 
> with more
> dynamic information models that are not very explicitly defined at
> development time. XML is very useful for these sorts of 
> thing. OO is still
> very useful as a programming paradigm for dealing with XML, but when
> information needs to be shared, it is important to factor out that
> information model from the OO model that is specific to your 
> own use of that
> information.
> 
> Database-centric applications had to contend with this issue 
> long before XML
> gained prominence. In the enterprise world it has been the 
> norm to write OO
> applications that deal with data in relational databases. It 
> has always been
> important in such applications to factor out the data model 
> that must be
> shared within the enterprise from the OO model that is specific to one
> application that needs to use that data. XML has not 
> fundamentally changed
> that; it has simply provided a richer, more flexible 
> mechanism for dealing
> with that shared data.
> 
> XML doesn't solve every problem, either. XML and OO can be useful
> complements to each other; neither is the end-all or be-all 
> of computing.
> 
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