Open Stack

Format wars are so tiring. What formats we Openstack should output is a 
marketing question, not a technical one. We should be trying to figure 
out how to do more formats, not fewer, because customers don't want us 
making choices that place constraints on them, especially when those are 
tied to religious wars like XML vs JSON.

I'll speak on behalf of my organization - Rackspace Internal IT. We've 
standardized on XML for backend work. We aren't spending much time 
debugging serialization issues and are pretty happy with our decision 
and aren't likly to change any time soon. People can argue JSON's merits 
all day, and at the point they try to tell me how to implement my 
solutions, all it does is annoy me, because format wars are annoying.

Customers want tooling that's flexible and doesn't try to force its 
opinions on them. So the obvious thing to do is support both JSON and 
XML, which isn't that hard. Web frameworks that can do it elegantly are 
a dime a dozen. The question we should be discussing is what to ADD to 
{XML, JSON}, not take away.

On 06/03/2011 04:37 AM, George Reese wrote:
> A lot of the arguments against both XML and JSON seem to boil down to "here's why XML sucks..."
>
> The reality is, for whatever reason, good or bad, a lot of people prefer to parse complex data in XML. There's a big market for it. Supporting both formats doesn't add horrible complexity.
>
> -George


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