Re: [xml-dev] Is XML a programming language monoculture?

I was told MS did not want to upgrade, because they have a 20 year support policy, and they were not sure it would have enough users to justify the expense. They were trying to correct their old image of not fixing bugs; one way was to keep versions stable. (30 years ago or so, I rang up Microsoft to complain about a bug, and they told me they do not fix bugs, because people would buy their software regardless of whether it had bugs or not: so no business justification to fix anything. Me coming from having dealt with HP and engineering sofware developers, it was so shocking to hear this from their phone support!)

My suspicion is that a lot of vendors got scared off as the run of big bad bogus technologies was launched and sucked all development budget: XSD, WS-* etc. The honeymoon was over. Then, along came JSON, which also needed to be supported and is better for some kinds of data (shame about the incompatabity). (Furthermore, because all the different environments have multiple implementations, including some like one of MS' that strips out text nodes that are only whitespace AARRGH, it was quite difficult for developers: in fact, even now there are some gotchas with factories for XML/XSD in Java on different webservers.)

Regards

Rick

On Mon, Sep 3, 2018 at 3:51 PM, Mukul Gandhi <gandhi.mukul@gmail.com> wrote:

On Sun, Sep 2, 2018 at 8:38 PM John Dziurlaj <john@hiltonroscoe.com> wrote:
In using XML and related standards over the years, XML Schema, XSLT, XPath, and SQL/XML, a single number stands out to me: “1.0”.

This is no surprise, as I’ve spent most of my time in the .NET space, where Microsoft has not seen fit to update its support of XML standards after its initial enthusiasm in the early 2000s. But looking around the ecosystem, other platforms aren’t doing much better. Even if you include third party libraries, support for the latest specifications is scare.

Support for modern XML technologies is centered around a single language, Java. XProc.org lists 6 of the 7 XProc implementations as Java based.

Why is this? Is this a problem? (you can guess my answer) What can be done to improve the situation?

I can't comment on why non Java vendors, haven't implemented latest XML related specs. But its certainly possible to, call Java implementations of XML related specs (new and old) from other languages (for e.g via web / REST / HTTP services).

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Regards,
Mukul Gandhi