E4X and/or VB9 XML Users - How's it going?

Hi Don
I realize that schemas and WSDL aren't that popular in the losely coupled world of B2C and the data oriented interfaces of social networking sites. But in the enterprise SOAP and WSDL are used much more heavily.

I would love to see somebody fix XML schema, make it workable with REST/ATOM and tidy up the whole stack. For more complicated and tightly coupled systems a machine readable schema is necessary - and better than the 'try it and see' approach of REST.

Doesn't really answer your question - but I still don't see any sign of the two approaches converging.

The real key -- to me, anyway -- is XML literals. XML as a first class object makes all the difference in the world. It's the one failing of C# at this point. Fix that one thing and C# becomes the front runner in XML querying/processing languages. When integrated with XSLT 2.0 via extension functions to gain the transformation powers, I can't imagine you would find a stronger combination of both power and productivity.

Hi Don, in my previous life I used E4X to paper over JAX-WS, and it was great. I wrote about it here:

<http://dsonline.computer.org/portal/pages/dsonline/2006/06/w3tow.html>

or if links don't show up in your comments, it was my "Scripting JAX-WS" Internet Computing column from May/June 2006, available from my home page.

I don't care about XML literals if I can have object literals (JSON) which can easily be serialized to XML.

As for the reply about XSDs, enterprise systems use XSDs as validation mechanisms for messages passed into an organisation. One of the troubles with XSD is that it is structural, not rule based - hence these enterprise systems tend to have a two-pronged approach to validation; XSD+Schematron or XSD+Custom code. That's not good.

RichB: - I wouldn't say that XSD are used as validation tools. So far, most of the XSD and WSDL in my experiences have been from vendor systems that we've deployed as a form of specification for their API.
Then even internally, XSD is used a lot for as a machine readable schema for ESBs and SOA.
I was only posting about it here because I was a follower of Don's List Server when he was closely involved with SOAP.

XSD doesn't have to be a 100% validation cerification - it just needs to cover 80% of the problem well.