goer.org

« Horse of a Different Colour | Main | Helpful Fascism »

Happy, Happy Machines

Mark Pilgrim: "Thought Experiment". It's not a thought experiment, actually. It's Jacques Distler's reality.

Here's a short story for you all. My company makes a large suite of J2EE software, mostly for banks and insurance companies. Our software uses XML all over the freaking place. We use XML for our configuration files, XML to communicate from our machines to our customer's machines, and so on. Machines happily consuming XML from other machines. It works just fine, thanks.

One example of where we are using XML is in our workflow engine. A workflow contains tasks, chained together in a kind of graph. If you change the shape of the graph or the nature of the tasks, you change the work that the end users (the customer service representatives) have to do. Tasks and workflows can be in various states, they can connect to each other in certain ways, they can branch due to logical conditions, they can contain timing information, they can be routed to specific users or groups... and on and on it goes. As you might expect, the XML that represents a workflow is rather baroque.

Fortunately, we provide a nice GUI interface that allows you to quickly create tasks and assemble them into a workflow. Like the workflow engine, the GUI interface can read our proprietary workflow XML format. But instead of running the workflow, the GUI merely displays it in graphical form. Anything you can do by editing XML files, you can do by using the GUI interface. Huzzah!

Unfortunately, one of my newly-adopted manuals both A) lists every element and attribute of our workflow XML format and B) describes how to use the XML in detail, with many code examples. By placing this information in our public documentation, we have accidentally encouraged our customer engineers to muck with the workflow XML format by hand. This has caused exactly the sort of problems you would expect. And this is why I spent a good chunk of last week stripping out all of this information from our public documentation. The information will partly move into the schema, partly be reserved for internal documentation. If our customers need this information, they can get it. But we won't be broadcasting the message, "Look! It's XML! Open it in vi and have at it!" quite so loudly.

The more I have to deal with XML, the more convinced I grow that XML is for machine-to-machine communication only.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jan. 14, 2004 at 9:11 AM | Comments (2)

Post a comment

Name

Email Address

URL (Optional, but hides your email address)

Are you a spammer? Yes No (REQUIRED — you must select "No" to post.)

Remember personal info?

NOTE: For mysterious reasons, comment posting is extremely slow right now. It can take from 30-60 seconds after you hit "Submit" for your comment to post. However, your comment will go through; you shouldn't need to click the button again.

Comment Syntax

The basics:

• For a new paragraph, enter two carriage returns.
• Plain URLs such as http://www.yahoo.com automatically become links.
• The system encodes all angle brackets and ampersands. For example, if you try to enter a HTML paragraph, the system displays the open tag literally as "<p>".

Show advanced syntax