Serge’s content

I found a very interesting blog post by Joe Gregorio entitled AtomPub is a failure. Well of course the title is there to get your attention, but the underlying argument is interesting : we now have other options for interchange formats.

We definitely live in interesting times, where so much focus on ease of integration is moving interoperability a *lot* faster. This can be a problem for standards that are trying to keep up, and mostly why I strongly believe that it can be a good thing implementation can drive specification like in the case of Apache Chemistry, the Apache project to build a strong CMIS implementation. Standards are very important, but in the end people also want and need strong reference implementations of those standards. After all, even HTTP was specified together with it's first implementation :)

JSON is incredibly powerful because it is so simple. I can explain it to a junior developer in a few minutes. I have trouble discussing XML formats with senior developers. Sure JSON is not as complete, but it also serves a lot of purposes. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we must get rid of XML, it is here to stay and quite useful, but I'm mostly talking about simplicity.

Another aspect of JSON that most tend to ignore is that with it's simplicity also comes it's efficiency. It is very hard to find another interchange format that is more compact, and easier to parse. In web systems that are constantly trying to handle bigger loads, the cost of XML processing can be offset by using JSON.

A really hope that the CMIS committee will approve the upcoming proposal to introduce JSON as a binding, even if it means in a first version to use it as an AtomPub interchange format, but I would much prefer that they go the whole way of making it an extremely simple binding that can be implemented by many in very little time. They have so far had this focus, so I'm pretty sure they are interested in this idea.

Oh and yes I am thinking about joining the OASIS TC :)