August 04, 2004

XML for data transmission

I was using XML as a file format for a recent project. Not a standardized dialect, just an ad hoc, custom flavor whipped up to hold the data of particular interest. Now, I've used many file formats and always thought XML was a bit hyped up. After all, it's bulky and angle brackets can be a bit tedious to wade through. In addition, parsing it is hard (creating it is difficult too, if you want to do so by creating a DOM tree). Not too hard, you say. Well, compare the joy of a StringTokenizer parsing a pipe delimited line to the pain of traversing around a DOM tree (to say nothing of the "if" hell of a SAX handler).

However, XML does have strong points. Storing hierarchical data in XML is easier. And, as far as I'm concerned, XML's killer feature as a file transport format is its self-documenting nature. Sure, you can put headers at the top of a pipe delimited file, but it's easy enough to forget them. Omitting the XML tags isn't really possible--you can choose obscure names for the tags that cloud the meaning of the data, but that's about the worst you can do. Using a custom flavor of XML as a data transmission format can be a really good idea; it just means you'll have a helper class to do the node traversing contortions everytime you want to read it. (I'm purposefully ignoring the technologies like JAX because I haven't used them.)

Posted by moore at August 4, 2004 01:27 PM | TrackBack
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