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I'd have to agree with Michael on this one. The places I've been have,
for the most part, tried to treat XML like something you needed to carry
around on the end of a long stick (wearing a RAD suit). Most of the
time, they just used the vendor supplied tools, or would just use Xerces
(and DOM), because that's what most google searches seemed to indicate
(speculation on my part here).
Not many developers seem to like XML much, and fewer still seem to
understand how to use it without shooting yourself in the foot from a
portability and extensibility point of view (automagically generating
data binding classes is one example). As a result, I think not as many
people can really leverage the flexibility offered by XML if you use it
in a more dynamic manner.
So, I'd say that the use of *any* particular API by default is more
related to the problem in paragraph #1 above than anything else. The
others are just symptoms of that one.
ast
On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 00:21, Michael Kay wrote:
> "People complain about the DOM, but they don't embrace alternatives.
> For all the work that people have done to provide alternatives such as
> JDOM, dom4j, XOM, etc. in the Java world, the typical users and the
> major Java players still use DOM, warts and all." I'm not at all
> convinced this is true, but I don't have any information at my
> fingertips to dispute it. Would anyone care to present facts on one
> side or the other?
>
> It's impossible to get facts about the how many developers are using
> different technologies: all one can do is share personal impressions.
>
> There's a logic flaw in the first sentence above: the people who
> complain probably do embrace alternatives; it's the people who don't
> complain who don't. And the vast majority of developers don't
> complain. They just put up with all the lousy stuff that's thrown at
> them. Many of them probably don't even recognize that it's lousy,
> others just expect technology to be lousy, that's how they earn their
> living, by making lousy technology work. After all, even on this list
> we all know that XML itself is not exactly flawless, yet we put up
> with it.
> But if this is true, why have cleaner, programming
> language-friendly alternatives failed to displace the dear old
> DOM as the dominant XML programming model after all these
> years? I have a few hypotheses (and these are MY hypotheses,
> not some FUD from Evil Empire Central Command, so blame me for
> any stupidities and the blatant exaggerations).
>
>
>
> - Duh, the network effect. A mediocre standard beats a better
> non-standard every time.
>
> - Serious XML developers use XSLT for the heavy lifting and
> simply don't worry about APIs any more.
>
> - Sun and IBM haven't included any of the alternatives in
> their distributions, so the masses don't even know these
> things exist, or fear being stranded in a backwater if they do
> adopt one.
>
> - Compiled languages are *so* last century, all the
> interesting XML processing alternatives are in the dynamic
> languages world. [E4X | Python | Ruby | PHP | Scala ] rulez,
> who cares about any of that stuff anymore?
>
>
>
> Thoughts on any of these hypotheses, anyone?
>
>
>
> I don't see much of your option 4. The others are all
> perfectly valid. DOM is part of the JDK so it must be
> mainstream. There's also a 5: A lot of Java users think that
> data binding is the right way to do things. And a 6: in many
> large companies technology choices are made by people with
> very limited technical knowledge - certainly not by
> programmers.
>
>
>
> Michael Kay
>
> http://www.saxonica.com/
--
Join me in Dubrovnik, Croatia on May 8-10th when I will be speaking at
InfoSeCon 2006. For more information, see www.infosecon.org.
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