The Daily WTF

While JSON’s strength is its (relative) simplicity, XML’s strength was always its power. Combined with an XML schema, you can create strongly typed documents with arbitrary data-types. For example, it’s easy to define, oh, I don’t know, a date time field in a way that isn’t stringly typed.

Of course, that’s what also creates its complexity. XML is big, and bloated, and expensive to parse. Which brings us back to the old days of SOAP- the Simple Object Access Protocol, essentially an XML remote procedure call. It was powerful, but complex, with lots of interlocking standards. With its Web Service Description Language (WSDL), the service could even be self documenting, laying out all the objects and fields you could interact with.

With all that web service tooling, it’s trivial to expose core elements in your object model as web service end points, which is great if your object model is

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