eds.activemath.org

Over and over the discussion of JSON vs XML (vs YAML…) appears: they are compared as languages to serialize object graphs. I may be old fashioned but I find there’s no valid reason for anything but XML.

Here’s a set claims in favor of JSON (or YAML it seems):

• JSON is more readable: I am sorry but I don’t find this true, being XML it’s much easier to know where parts start and end since end-tags are named. Most of the times the object graph is not sufficiently indented to recognize any structure hence readability only appears after you’ve tweaked a bit.

Since a few weeks, we are playing with Google Web Toolkit, a very nice tool that compiles java code to JavaScript. Among the features of GWT, transparent remote server invocation is offered. The nice thing is that it right away forces you to consider services asynchronous which yields responsive user-interfaces. The wrong thing is that it seems to be fully version dependent to a point where, basically, one wishes to throw it all away.

The question of storage of OMDocs keeps coming… why the hell do you, in ActivMath, use your own storage solution for OMDoc fragments and not one of the classical SQL or XML databases? Below is a short answer, helped by Eliotte Rusty Harold.