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Introduction To XAML
prostoalex writes "It was recently reported that Microsoft will integrate its own XML-based language for application programming into the next edition of Windows (codename Longhorn). This Introduction to XAML (Extensible Application Markup Language) provides an insight into how it's possible to build a Windows application with Microsoft's brand-new XAML language."
XML is meant to be interoperable.
How well does XAML achieve in this regard?
If Microsoft was only a technology company and could leave that whole messy marketing evilness out of it. Microsoft has come up with (or outright "borrowed") some very cool RAD technologies over the years. But god help us if they try to integrate any more then the UI elements into this "programming language" (I was once forced to use an ad-hoc XML-based programming language... it sounded ok until you tried to program in it, implementing logic was weird), but for the UI, wow.
"1984" was ment to be a warning, not a guidebook. You hear that Kim Jong-il!? BushCo?!
Mmm not so much.
All this does is abstract the UI from the code.
(Which is super if you look at the kludgey cra* they have foisted on developers through the VS series of products. I have always liked the ease of use of MS's designers but the resulting code usually made me angry. Nothing like adjusting the attribute of a control in the source and having it crash your IDE.)
You will still need to write behaviours for any application using XAML.
I believe there's been a couple of O/S projects that have done the same thing for a couple of years (abstracting UI to XML) but I'm not sure of the names..
The idea of XML-based interface definition has been around well before XAML. There are a ton of XML user interface languages around: http://xul.sourceforge.net/. Hell, Mozilla is built around it: http://www.hevanet.com/acorbin/xul/top.xul
You've been modded "funny" as I write this but really you have an interesting point.
The answer is that to date, all of our wheels have been spikey and sharp, tending to work poorly and often killing, crushing, and destorying things in its path, rather then working as designed.
My pet example of this is "Object Oriented Programming". I think OOP is a significant advance, but it took 20 years to start to get implementations of it that were really useful, in C++, in Python, in a couple of other languages. (I take a broad view here. C# probably qualifies, but I haven't used it. Perl does for wizards only; technically the capabilities exist but they're damned hard to really get right. Java is getting there but still borderline, unless you augment it with other tools. Most other implementations tend to hit complexity walls too early to be useful, such as pre-template C++.) Think "design patterns", and the subsequent work being done based on that.
Finding the best way to do one thing is easy. Finding the best way to do a million things is harder. Iterators or Observers? MVC or something else? Pervasive persistence or request only? (These are of course only sample questions, not meant to be answered or considered as exhaustive.) The only way to answer these questions on a large scale is to try them on a large scale. That takes time, and a lot of what seems like re-invention, as some new combination is tried out with a few subtly different answers from last time.
The sheer staggering multiplicity of answers on so many dimensions is really unprecendented in any other Engineering field, since they all tend to be able to use "physical locality" to isolate the complexities of their system. Consider the almost uniformity of mainstream CPU design, for instance; is it really so inconceivable that a little 'reinvention of the wheel', i.e., a complete re-thinking of PC architecture, isn't called for?
Right now, we really don't know as much as Language X bigots ("Language X is the one true way!") would have you think. There's still a lot of room for experimentation. And the only true way to experiment is by building a slightly different wheel, and seeing if it maims its users slightly less then before in a wide variety of situations.
In this sense, "software engineering" almost approaches a true experimental science, albeit with very engineering-oriented experiments.
Although I empathize with your sentiment, you obviously have no clue what your talking about in reference to the actual article submitted(yes, this is slashdot, big shock). The article's comment is a little misleading, this isn't for coding, it's for interface layout, which XML is quite effective at if you've ever touched XUL. XML is heirarchical. As are most, if not all, common GUI components. And separating logic from layout is A Good Thing, which XUL performs more cleanly than most toolkits I've seen (Swing, Windows Forms).
The true measure of the impact of a technology is how many highly effective solutions you can find that it wasn't really intended for. This is one for XML.