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Sun & Microsoft Square Off With XML Standards
Chris Gardner writes "ZDNet has an interesting and informative article on the upcoming battle between XML standards proposed by Sun and Microsoft. Microsoft's standards lie at the heart of their .NET initiative."
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Personally, the only reason that I give Oracle any more slack than Microsoft is that their software basically does what it's supposed to, reliably and consistently. Now, if you try to run any medium to large-scale Oracle database on an OS other than Solaris, you're probably in for some major headaches, but it can be done. As a business entity, though, Oracle is just as bitchy, proprietary, and overpriced as Microsoft, and they are just as happy to run over anything that stands in the way of their total market domination. Just a bunch of good capitalists, I suppose, but not great at instilling warm fuzzies in me.
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There's nothing that ties an XML schema to a particular database or OS, except the laziness of programmers and managers; if you need to implement that B2B communications tool today, you're probably going to go with the tool that (at least in theory) allows you to do it without reinventing the wheel. From a business point of view, if Microsoft offers tools that let you do that without risking a screwup by one of your programmers, then their solution seems very attractive.
In all reality, both of these companies are highly involved in the creation of XML standards largely because that's how the W3C and the rest of the Internet business community want it; the whole idea of the period between Candidate Recommendation and Recomendation status at the W3C is a sort of trial period for software companies (read: big, influental software companies) to attempt implementation of a new 'standard', and give the group feedback on what areas worked, what areas gave them major headaches, etc. Think of it as popular approval from the business world, where market share means everything.
Why do you think XML has taken off for business messaging and rapid application development, while the really cool XML applications like SVG and RDF, though they've been bouncing around for years, have yet to get the kind of major industry support they need to reach success? There's no incentive for the big players (Sun, MS, IBM, et. al.) to spend their time working on things that would primarily benefit consumers, academics, and the Internet community as a whole when they could be making the "next big thing" for businesses.
Hmm... A few examples from the XML world come to mind. XSL (MS has the patent, but has agreed to allow anyone to use it for free, and turned it over to W3C). XML Schemas (another MS invention that is now in the hands of W3C). SOAP (again...).
Look, MS has a long history of being the bad guys in a lot of areas. But XML is not one of those areas.
XML has some real deficiencies dealing with large binary data (I do a lot of work in the oil industry with seismic data, where a single data set can be hundreds of gigabytes). MS is trying to address this area, too, along with IBM (SOAP). Yeah, they're going to push the envelope with XML. If they didn't, we wouldn't have XSL and XML Schemas today. And if we were talking about any issue other than XML, I'd say this is probably a bad thing. But they have a real commitment in the XML world towards open standards bodies (W3C). Take it for face value. It's a good thing, for once...
--Be human.
Did anyone else notice that the proposed "standard" by Microsoft will require SQL server 2000? At the bottom of the article it is explained that SQL server is required to implement Microsoft's proposed "standard".
I'm sorry, but at what point did we decide that all standards should be dependent on Microsoft being able to sell more copies of its software? Something about that just makes me feel dirty. Surely there would be a way to implement it without using SQL server from Microsoft. And if not, will any "standards" group actually accept it?
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- http://xml.apache.org
I've used the Xerces-C library (it's actually C++) in a consumer GUI product whose user documents were XML files, and I think it's just great - it builds on many platforms. A wrapper allows Xerces-C to be used from Perl. Xerces-J has a similar API (DOM and SAX) but is written in Java. They have stuff for XSLT, Scalable Vector Graphics, Soap and so on.So you really don't need to buy into someone's proprietary platform, use the source luke.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
<?xml version="5.00.2195" encoding="Office0.9"?>
4
h
w
r
<!DOCTYPE biz-talk PUBLIC '-//Microsoft//DTD BizTalk//EN' 'http://microsoft.com/biztalk.dtd'>
<BiztalkMessage>
DCOM:rtgedf-k87fh7364h384753oj5-387j4io53j453ooko
87979654-s4-dfs4453534676567-34535fds45t54hhhghhg
987958cs-gbf5t0-er345-fgdfg5-5jhjfhj-ew4-4sdsf4-w
89d8f7-98lkj3j-3234-sefs-435534aflk9rtew-wtgdsrgf
</BiztalkMessage>
This is just the real world - as long as MS's standards are open and not proprietry I have no particular problem with it.
Too bad, then, that MS has declared that they intend to use XML as a container for proprietary (read 'closed') data formats. We suspected this for some time, but in a recent interview Ballmer came right out and said so.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
What does HTML and the web have to do with XML? XML is used on the server for data markup. It is then processed and stored in databases, sent to other servers, or transformed into something displayable, like HTML. XML is not something you will have on a web page like a Java applet or a MIDI tune. To do the data crunching and processing, you use an XML parser with DOM or XSL transformations. It's needed because SGML was too loose of a specification to be practical. XML defines a set of easy to implement rules about how documents are built, how DTD's for the document types are described etc.
Now here's something for you to disagree with: XHTML should replace HTML as soon as possible so that we can get rid of the horrible beast! Hopefully IE5.5 and Mozilla and WAP 2.0 will make the transition faster.
http://www.sdtimes.com/news/015/story1.htm
Glad to oblige. From "Microsoft's Ballmer: Sun has no clue.":
Microsoft will continue to protect any intellectual property that it embeds as objects in XML wrappers. "We will have proprietary formats to protect our intellectual property," he said.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I've looked over C# and it looks pretty good...an obvious Java ripoff with some additional syntactical candy and the ability to cast explicit pointers...whether it will attract a wide array of developers is another matter. Microsoft may not have learned their lesson from J++.
One thing MS definitely *does not have* is a wide marketshare on the client side. This is because they've focused too much on PCs and not enough on PDAs (I'm sorry, WinCE doesn't have anywhere near the same market share as Palm) and cell phones (where Microsoft doesn't even compete). In fact, unless Microsoft opens up their standards the way Sun did, and makes C# available on platforms besides Windows, C# is pretty much going to stay in the Windows environment. That's going to hurt adoption of the C# language, especially on applications that require lots of iron.
My guess? .NET and C# are going to define the way Windows is used in the next half-decade, but it won't take the same market share as Java.
If anything, Microsoft is frightening the other companies into adopting open and standardized rule-sets. After all, if the rest of us won't do it, Microsoft will. Not that adopting open and standardized rule-sets hasn't stopped Microsoft from "embracing and extending" ... far from it ....
The Free ODMG Project needs volunteers.
Finding God in a Dog
Look at CORBA, for example. A bunch of companies tried to ensure that their latest, greatest coolest features were in the standard and the end result was an ugly, unweildy and complicated standard.
Right, but XML isn't like that at all. The idea behind XML is creating a minimal framework (a (gak) meta-standard, if you will) which can be extended through DTDs for specific tasks. XML is already being used, nobody is sitting on their hands saying they can't incorporate XML because it's not final, yet companies out there are trying to modify it and call their implementation the standard.
HTML is a better example. When two companies take a standard and try to make it evolve along divergent paths (Netscape's D-HTML and IE's HTML4.0), the public suffers, as browsers will implement one or the other, and is therefore non-standard and means massive incompatability or doubled efforts in website creation.
Sure, Microsoft's implementation wins in the end. As you say, it's Darwinian evolution. but the point is that this evolution is always going on, and though it may leave a trail of accepted standards in its wake, they're no longer the area of market focus, and aren't as important as the 'next thing' that's being worked on, inevitably by more than one company with different business plans and marketing goals.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
This is not about XML! It's about BizTalk vs. Sun's e-business XML language. Nobody has any problems agreeing upon what XML is and how it works. The whole point of XML is to create new languages - hence eXtensible.
Besides, to those who bash Microsoft for embracing and extending others standards, it's worth nothing who wrote the original XML spec:
Editors:
Tim Bray, Textuality and Netscape
Jean Paoli, Microsoft
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, University of Illinois at Chicago and Text Encoding Initiative
Eve Maler, Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Second Edition
It's just as much Microsoft's standard as it is Sun's and Netscape's and if anyone is going all out for XML, it's Microsoft. Which is not to say that Sun wouldn't be going all out for it; just take a look at java.sun.com today!
It's this sort of quote that really makes me lose respect for the articles. Calling something 'lame' in a tech article does not suffice, except when herding lower IQ types into opposing a technology and chuckling at the misfortunes of another.