I like my old friend

 

It is an old post based on old idea, it is not relevant anymore.

 

XML VS JSON. Which one is the super-power to exchange data from server-side to client-side? This is old debate. You will find thousands article about it. Why am I writing about it?

When I was working with IBM Toronto Lab, someone asked me why I like XML. I said my reason and I have only one reason. Most of the people like JSON because of its hype and unfortunately, they did not get the opportunity to work with complex data. 

JSON is the best approach to transfer data from server-side to the client-side because JSON is lighter than XML and easy to fetch data from JavaScript. It is true only if complexity of data and business requirement are simple.

Now think about the following scenario, I am working with scheduling software where XML contains schedule of each team member. I need to send more than 1000 data from server to client side such as, RIA at a time.  The big picture of the XML is:

<company>
 <department-list>
  <team-list>
   ---------------------
  </team-list>
 </department-list>
</company>

[I am assuming, number of department are 10, teams of each department are 10, and members of each team are 10. Here, I am concerning only list type data. Obviously, in real life we have more data, like name, tile, skills, vacations etc.]

So company contains list of departments where each department contains list of teams, each team contains list of team members and each team member contains schedule data list. Schedule data list contains 5/7 days schedule of each team member. Now it is not so easy to produce JSON string according to this business requirement. JSON will produce a number of brackets (), {} [] because of chain list of objects. JSON's brackets will be more shocking than angle brackets <> of XML. Too many brackets of JSON generate terrible maintenance procedure in the future.

XML might be verbose than JSON, but XML is easy to follow, easy to debug, easy to parsing, and easy to modify according to the business needs because of its simple structure. According to my point of view, XML is the best where large amount of data need to be sent from server to client at a time. So I like my old friend XML very much.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

There is a process already using the admin port 4848 -- it probably is another instance of a GlassFish server; ERROR

After long time later, I am writing my programming blog again. Today, I downloaded glassfish-3.1.2.2-unix.sh. I am running Fedora 16. After successful installation of the glassfish, I was getting error when I ran the the following command: asadmin>start-domain "There is a process already using the admin port 4848 -- it probably is another instance of a GlassFish server. Command start-domain failed." Then I checked my hostname of the machine: hostname I got my hostname is nix-domain Now, nix-domain is not listed in the /etc/hosts file. Therefore, I added nix-domain in the file. 127.0.0.1               localhost nix-domain Now, I tried to run the start-domain again. It started perfectly without any error. Therefore, I understood that my machine assigned hostname 'nix-domain' is not listed in the hosts file, glassfish generated the error. I am hoping, it is not only the solution, there must be other way to solve this problem.
Read more

How to Convert OutputStream to InputStream

Sometime we need to convert Output Stream to Input Stream. We can perform the conversion multiple ways.  The following two approaches are most popular: 1. ByteArrayOutputStream to ByteArrayInputStream 2. PipedOutputStream to PipedInputStream Complete example code is available in the [ Github ]. Approach 1: ByteArrayOutputStream/ByteArrayInputStream The ByteArrayOutputStream/ByteArrayInputStream is the easiest way to convert OutputStream to InputStream. Code snippet: TextWriter textWriterBins = new TextWriter(); ByteArrayOutputStream bouts = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); textWriterBins.write(bouts); ByteArrayInputStream bins = new ByteArrayInputStream(bouts.toByteArray()); TextReader textReader = new TextReader(bins); textReader.print(); Here, TextWriter is a class which writes some text in the OutputStream and TextReader is a class which reads data from InputStream and print on the console. In the above code snippet, the TextWriter.write method writes the data in the
Read more

How to compile and install GraphicsMagick (GM) in Linux

Today, I installed GM in my Mint machine. Here is the steps I used to compile and install GM in my Mint machine. Prerequired libraries: sudo apt-get install -y libpng-dev libjpeg-dev sudo apt-get install -y libjasper-dev sudo apt-get install -y install libtiff5-dev libfreetype6-dev Download GM source:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/graphicsmagick/files/graphicsmagick/1.3.21/GraphicsMagick-1.3.21.tar.gz/download Extract the archive file:  tar -xf GraphicsMagick-1.3.21.tar.gz Configure, complie and install: ./configure --prefix=[path to install GM] --enable-shared --enable-symbol-prefix --with-frozenpaths --with-ttf --with-jbig --with-jpeg --with-jp2 --with-png --with-tiff --with-webp --with-wmf sudo make install (su/sudo is necessary if you want to install other than home directory, i.e: /opt/) Create GM_HOME sh in the profile directory: (In Mint Linux gm_home.sh file should be in /etc/profile.d/gm_home.sh) Create gm_home.sh file by your favourite editor and add
Read more