RE: Bob's letter on V5R4 RPG stuff

To be honest, XML is being used for WAAAAAYYYY too much more than it was
ever intended. I think this is mostly due to our culture of black and white
technology decisions in a world of grey (and color). 
XML is not "the" answer. It is simply one tool in the every evolving and
changing technology of software. 
RPG already had support for Java, CL, C and somewhat, C++. Why not XML? It
already has HTML support via CGIDEV2 and now CGILIB in RPG xTools, so why
not XML? 
The hard thing about XML is reading the file. The not as hard part of XML is
creating it. I've had a CvtToXML() subprocedure in RPG xTools for over 2
years. Call it, pass a DS and a file name, and you get back the data in XML.

IBM did a great job giving RPG IV XML read/parse support in February 2006
instead of cause everyone to write their own interfaces that may or may not
work in most situations. Even worse would be IBM giving us XML support in
2007 or 2008 or later after we've all, already written our own XML
interfaces.

George, Barbara and the nameless/faceless others who pushed this through... 
Very Nicely Done!


-Bob Cozzi
www.RPGxTools.com
RPG xTools - Enjoy programming again.


-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Aaron Bartell
Sent: Thursday, February 02, 2006 10:11 AM
To: 'RPG programming on the AS400 / iSeries'
Subject: RE: Bob's letter on V5R4 RPG stuff

>What happens when XML goes away for the next flavor?  I'd rather have
generic tools than specific tools which can be built externally from RPG
using RPG and those generic tools.

I am sure there will be a next technology to take XML's place someday, but
the good thing is that XML is being deeply ingrained into the big players
which *should* guarantee a certain amount of shelf life.

There actually already are other standards out there that aim to do the same
thing as XML and were created because of XML's bloated tags.

Here are a couple of the alternatives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML

Aaron Bartell
http://mowyourlawn.com