Comments on: The Usual Madness

By: Sgt Turmeric

Sgt Turmeric — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 21:10:27 +0000

I thought writing an HTTP proxy was bad. Then I had to write a MIME parser.

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:26:05 +0000

Great post, and your comments on XML seem to have really touched a raw nerve!

My pet peeve: using XML for log files. I have in mind a particular enterprise software vendor that has been infected with this mutant virus over the past few years.

The touted benefits – standardization, integration and extensibility – are dubious at best, and usually longer term benefits more for the vendor not user. Of course a stiff price we have to pay: storage bloat and vastly diminshed usabilty from a sysadmin perspective (forget all those quick tail -f | grep tricks)

By: SecretSquirrel

SecretSquirrel — Sat, 31 May 2008 22:14:57 +0000

Yep, XML is rubbish. Totally agree, what’s wrong with a database or struct for data, and what’s wrong with good old fashioned config files?

It’s a sad day when you see people testing and debugging code that only has ro read a config file…

By: landon

landon — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:16:31 +0000

I once worked on an embedded system that had bandwidth to its file server on the order of 1K/second. Customers were *waiting* while this little box dragged down configuration file after configuration file.

Someone insisted on an XML-based configuration file. Given the limited ROM space we had, I wrote a parser of a subset of XML that fit in about 1K of code. Didn’t support DTDs, pretty obviously.

I nearly lost it when someone complained that the custom parser didn’t support comments. _Customers are waiting_ and you want to blather away about stuff in a file that no one but you will ever see?

In retrospect, I should have ripped out the “XML” support and just given them a bunch of structs with fixed-size strings. Would have saved space all around. Go ahead, _comment that_….

By: Thomas

Thomas — Thu, 29 May 2008 07:27:27 +0000

Fully agree with the XML rant – it seems to get worse with every project, too! And the freedom to use either plain text or tag attributes for data – or to even mix both – completely kills the idea of pre-built code libraries that will always work. You’ve got to reinvent the wheel every time.

By: landon

landon — Wed, 28 May 2008 18:14:12 +0000

@Barry: The libraries I’ve used have been callback-based and iterator-based, which means (essentially) that you’re enumerating over the elements of your XML schema and that you have to write additional code to make sense of the stuff as it “flies by.” So typically I’ve written hash-table-based adapters, which completely wipe-out order. This would seem to go against the original design of XML, which was a mark-up language rather than a data-bearing language, but it’s what most people use XML for these days.

Maybe I need to get a better set of XML parsers.

The problem with this is that a mapping from an XML scheme to a hash table is not necessarily easy; what you wind up with (often) is a complex set of nested hash tables, vectors and similar gorp that are nearly as bad to navigate as the original XML. Furthermore, there are different “styles” of data-bearing to deal with (e.g., key-value pairs in tags, or putting keys in tags and the data as “plain text,” and probably other variants). So we’re no longer talking a nice, simple dictionary now, but something that has to adapt to fit all the many ways that XML can be used to express data.

By: Barry

Barry — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:17:20 +0000

I think the main reason XML is so popular as a kitchen sink is because (a) there are libraries for it that ship with things like PHP, and (b) the libraries take you from XML to organized data automagically, meaning you never have to worry about arbitrary ordering of the data.

By: SDC

SDC — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:50:22 +0000

You’ve probably heard this one, but for those who haven’t, I always thought this quote about XML was accurate:

XML is like violence – if a little doesn’t solve your problem, use some more.

It explains a lot about how XML is generally (mis)used, anyway…

By: Captain Confusion

Captain Confusion — Sun, 25 May 2008 19:52:39 +0000

I was working on a project where the entire configuration was stored in XML. The idea was that eventually that there would be a GUI configuration tool and the user would never see any XML.

Of course the budget ran out so setting up a project using the software meant editing hundreds of arcane XML files in a crap freeware XML editor (no budget remember). It didn’t help that every time MS rolled out a new version or an update for IE it would steal the XML file-type associations.

Also validating a 50MB XML file against its schema and then loading it into memory as a document takes a lot of CPU and RAM. Starting up the app and waiting for it to load was one of those times you could go get a cup of copy and go the the loo. Of course you never did because you anxiously watched the console output for error messages.

Starting a new project now. XML suggested as a scripting/configuration solution. I may swing by the security shop to pick up a cattle prod. They are really useful for persuading silly people of the error of their ways.