Comment by int_handler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by int_handler | Hacker News Reader

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My impression is that the reason why XML is so well-regarded in the enterprise is because these companies are not aware of better alternatives, such as Protocol Buffers [1]. The reason why XML has a bad reputation outside of the enterprise is because it is so incredibly verbose (both the language itself and the code used for working with it), and that all-in-all, it is a sub-optimal solution to a solved problem.

To illustrate: Protocol Buffers' wire format is much more compact. It removes the complexity of having to deal with XML parsers by providing classes generated from the message definition/schema. You can use it with GRPC to implement your service APIs. It is supported for many different languages, including Java and C#. It now even has a JSON mapping [2]. Overall, Protocol Buffers can do everything XML can do as both an exchange format and as a configuration language but better.

[1] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/

[2] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/docs/proto3#j...

Protocol Buffers are just one of many proprietary serialization libraries. Regardless of technical excellence, Protocol Buffers and competing libraries are automatically much less suitable for actual enterprise use than open standard serialization protocols with multiple interoperable implementations, such as ASN.1. And of course, XML is usually preferable to ASN.1 or the like because it is equally standardized but it has an ample choice of implementations, advanced tools and human readability and writability.

Protocol buffer isn't proprietary. It's just not a standards based protocol. But it doesn't stop you from writing code against it, and you can easily interop with a third party who is using protocol buffers.

Protocol Buffers is not proprietary. It is open source under the BSD license. Here is the source code: github.com/google/protobuf. It is very much an open protocol, and anyone is free to write their own implementation of it. It is just a standards-based protocol.

If your organization values the existence of a standard over technical excellence, then there is no use in convincing you. Otherwise, in terms of ease of use, performance, tooling, and human readability and writability, Protocol Buffers is superior to XML-based protocols (since the API for converting between the binary and text formats is extremely simple to use).

As a fun fact, if you really wanted to use XML as a wire format, you could even write an XmlFormat ser/de for Protocol Buffers, similar to the JsonFormat that is already provided, but then it would defeat one of the main purposes of using Protocol Buffers in the first place because you would replace an extremely performant wire format with an extremely sub-optimal one.

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