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Ten predictions for XML in 2007

Elliotte Rusty Harold predicts what's in store for XML this year

Level: Introductory

Elliotte Rusty Harold ( elharo@metalab.unc.edu), Adjunct Professor, Polytechnic University

13 Feb 2007

2006 was a quiet year for XML. Will 2007 be more exciting? Elliotte Rusty Harold predicts it will be.

2007 is shaping up to be the most exciting year since the community drove off the XML highway into the Web services swamp half a decade ago. XQuery, Atom, Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), XProc, and GRRDL are all promising new power. Some slightly older technologies like XForms and XSLT are having new life breathed into them. 2007 will be a very good year to work with XML.

XQuery

XQuery's been a "next year" technology for at least four or five years now, but in 2007 it finally arrives. First, the finished set of XQuery 1.0, XPath 2.0, and XSLT 2.0 specifications will reach full recommendation status, and sooner rather than later. In fact, it did so the day I was doing the final edits to this piece. :-)

Furthermore, the update part of XQuery is marching forward rapidly. It probably won't be finished this year, but it's already solid enough to be implemented, as long as users don't mind modifying their code a tad with each new draft. The situation will only improve throughout the year.

Moreover, 2007 should see betas of javax.xml.xquery. This is a standard API for connecting Java™ programs to XQuery engines and databases. Think of it as Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) for XQuery. It enables you to mix XQuery into your Java code. This will become a standard part of the Java class library with the release of Java 7 in 2008.

Finally, native XML databases are hitting the market in force, and users are starting to take notice. On the low end, eXist and Sleepycat's (now Oracle's) dbXML are looking better and better. Hybrid solutions like Oracle Database 10g Release 2 and IBM® DB2 9 PureXML will drive XQuery adoption among their existing customers who need to mix some documents with their traditional tables. Pure XML databases like Mark Logic will continue to convert big publishers that can afford the cost of entry.

Most important, many problems are much easier to solve with a native XML database and XQuery than with a relational database and Structured Query Language (SQL). SQL databases are powerful and useful, and they're not going away. However, they've never been a good fit for the Web; and more applications these days are Web based than not. Programs like WordPress and MediaWiki sit on top of relational databases because those were the tools the developers had at hand, not because they were the right tools for the job. By the end of the year, look for at least one each of Wiki, Content Management System, and blog engine to sit on top of eXist or another XQuery database. On the down side, I predict that at least one and probably all three of these products will turn XQuery injection from a theoretical problem into a practical one.

Office documents will be another driver for XML database adoption. A huge amount of corporate and noncorporate data isn't stored in XML at all. It's tied up in Microsoft® Word, Excel®, and PowerPoint® files, often on individual computers. Now that these programs are saving to native XML, it becomes possible to store such documents in centrally managed XML databases.

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Atom Publishing Protocol

If I had to choose one big story for next year, it would be the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). APP started out as a standard way to post blog entries, but it's turning into much, much more. APP and Atom stand ready to do for Web authoring what the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) did for Web browsing. Tim Berners-Lee always meant the Web to be a read-write medium, but it didn't work out that way. Only the publishing/reading half of the system has been in place for the last 15 years. Writing happened using severely limited HTML forms or non-HTTP methods like File Transfer Protocol (FTP).

APP defines a standard means of publishing new content that all servers can implement. Independent software vendors can write their own authoring tools that talk to APP services on the different servers. You'll finally be able to use full-blown editors like Word or Emacs to write Web content, rather than the limited tools you find in a browser. Uploading content can become as simple as saving a file on the local hard drive is today.

APP is the first major protocol to be based on Representational State Transfer (REST), the architecture of the Web. Most systems to date have only used a subset of HTTP, usually GET and POST but not PUT or DELETE. Many systems like SOAP and Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) have been actively contradictory to the design of HTTP. APP, by contrast, is working with HTTP rather than against it.

If I'm right, and APP takes off, then this will have a couple of important consequences. First, APP will be a nice example that shows people how to design new systems RESTfully. Second, it will force a lot of naive firewalls and proxy servers to be reconfigured to allow PUT and DELETE to pass through, along with POST and GET. This should help eliminate the need to tunnel everything through POST, and make other RESTful apps a lot more plausible.

Another problem besides broken proxies that has held back full adoption of REST is the inability of a browser form to allow any methods other than GET and POST. This too will change, and APP is the major use case driving that change. XForms and Web Forms 2.0 are also scheduled to get a REST upgrade by allowing PUT and DELETE as browser actions in addition to the current GET and POST. Once implemented by browser vendors and learned by the Web developer community, these methods will improve Web security. However, this takes time, and the full impact isn't likely to come about until 2008 at the earliest.

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Forms

I don't see a big future for the WHAT Working Group's Web Forms 2.0. It's got some nice bells and whistles, but it doesn't change anything. It's a modest cosmetic improvement -- nothing revolutionary. Some Web developers will begin adopting it, but most will ignore it, just as Microsoft has. Many features can be supplied inside Windows® Internet Explorer® through JavaScript; but these are the same features that are available today through JavaScript. They'll just be a little more standard. Web Forms 2.0 doesn't bring anything new to the table, and it doesn't radically alter how you think about or design your forms.

XForms, by contrast, is ready to take off. The spec's been finished for years, and the implementations are finally beginning to catch up. Despite limited browser support, look for increasing adoption in intranet solutions. Why will XForms succeed when Web Forms 2 won't? Because XForms goes much further. Unlike Web Forms, it changes the architecture of the house, not just the color of the paint. Developing an XForms-enabled application is different than developing a classic HTML form-based application. The simple fact is that HTML forms were always a hack: a quick and dirty solution for simple problems. They were never intended to bear the weight developers have loaded on top of them, and they've been creaking for years. They aren't an adequate foundation to replace desktop applications and usher in Web 2.0. There's a good reason so many Web 2.0 applications are more JavaScript than HTML: You can't do what you need to do with HTML forms.

XForms goes back to the drawing board and redefines the architecture. There are now separate models, views, and controllers. With XForms, Web applications start to look like clean programs designed by professionals, not hacks thrown together by graphic artists who took a one-semester course in Basic in early high school.

Of course, the most benefit will accrue to the people writing the more complex applications. Not everyone needs the full power of XForms. Simple contact forms, mailing-list subscriptions, online polls, one-click purchases, and the like are adequately served by classic HTML forms. However, more complex forms for multipage checkouts, blog management, firewall administration, and so forth will benefit greatly from XForms. The more client-side JavaScript and server-side PHP that you're using to manage your forms today, the more likely that you'll benefit from XForms tomorrow. Declarative markup will replace much brittle procedural code.

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XProc

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has produced a large number of standards and technologies for working with XML: namespaces, Infoset, XInclude, XSLT, schemas, canonical XML, and more. What they haven't done is specify how all these pieces fit together. In particular, they haven't specified details like whether you should do schema validation before or after XInclude resolution.

This isn't an oversight. For example, the W3C wanted to allow XInclude resolution to happen before or after schema validation. Sometimes you want it before; sometimes you want it after. The question then becomes how you organize the different possible chains of processing. This is where XProc enters the picture.

XProc is an XML format that specifies what to do to an XML document in which order. XProc defines a pipeline of operations. The input to each step in the pipeline is an XML document or documents, and the output from a nonterminal step is also an XML document. (Terminal steps sometimes generate non-XML.) Steps can specify validation, XInclusion, transformation, custom processing using the Simple API for XML (SAX), and more. An XProc processor can read an XProc document and then apply the specified steps in the specified order. This makes writing document-processing applications much simpler. For example, complicated XSLT transformations can sometimes be broken into two simpler pieces that are applied in sequence. XProc lets you glue the pieces together without writing a custom driver for your application.

Developers have been asking for this functionality for a long time. 2007 should see it delivered.

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The Semantic Web

2007 is the make-or-break year for the Semantic Web. The specs are done. The tools are in place, and there's still not a whiff of a killer app anywhere to be seen. The Achilles heel of the Semantic Web may well be the complete disinterest of most authors in producing anything remotely approximating metadata for their pages. Search engines have learned to ignore any user-created metadata because honest publishers don't bother with it and dishonest spammers abuse it. Screen readers don't even bother with the limited semantics already in HTML, trying instead to figure out what the page looks like.

If publishers can't be relied on to provide metadata, then where can you get it from? How about from the data itself? Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) is the first Semantic Web technology that does away with the notion of publishers generating their own metadata. GRDDL consults XSLT stylesheets supplied by third parties to scrape the metadata off Web pages. The output from these stylesheets are Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples that you can process with the underutilized RDF toolset. Different stylesheets can be applied to different sites as needed. Indeed, different consumers can use different stylesheets that provide the information they find of most value.

It's a clever plan, and it seems like it might work (which is more than I can say for most of the Semantic Web). But this is the last chance. If GRDDL can't make the Semantic Web happen, nothing can.

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OpenDocument

OpenDocument smacked Microsoft upside the head in 2006. Look for Microsoft and its Office Open XML format to continue losing ground in 2007. Office Open XML isn't a reasonable file format: It's packed with over a decade's worth of legacy crud, and it's unimplementable and untestable. It's a paper standard, nothing more. Smart, competent governments will recognize this and make OpenDocument their standard, possibly along with PDF or HTML.

Many businesses and other organizations will continue to choose Microsoft Office because they have a legacy investment in it, or just because that's what they think businesses buy. Office Open XML will be a genuine boon to these users. It might not be the best choice, but it's a better one than they have now. However, many secretaries, salespeople, and CEOs who don't know what word processor they use, much less what format they save their data in, will be quietly upgraded to OpenOffice by their tech staff.

Microsoft will unintentionally help this migration. Software audits, digital restrictions management, and onerous activation schemes embedded in new versions of Office and Windows will push many businesses off the Microsoft platform for the first time in decades. For 2007, many of these organizations will stay with older versions of Microsoft products; but eventually they'll crossgrade to OpenOffice and its XML formats.

Most important, however, I predict zero adoptions of Office Open XML by any other office program. Its use will be limited to the Microsoft Office ecosystem, where it will ease development for vendors of small plug-ins, office utilities, and add-ons. However, independent products that need a native format for their own word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, and so forth will pick OpenDocument instead. (One exception: Drawing programs will choose Scalable Vector Graphics [SVG].)

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XML in the client

2007 will be the first year in which almost every significant browser fully supports XSLT 1.0. It will finally become possible to publish real XML directly on the Web without prerendering it to HTML first. Although this won't be common practice by any stretch of the imagination, I predict that at least one major site (and quite a few minor ones) will begin doing this. I also predict that nobody will notice, because it will all just work.

Longer term (probably after 2007), I predict that this will render many of the debates about HTML 5 and XHTML 2 moot. Sites will publish content in whatever XML vocabulary they like, and provide stylesheets that convert it to HTML for browser display. Changing your document format will no longer require a years-long process of W3C working groups and slow browser adoption.

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Put a fork in it; they're done

WS-* (pronounced WS-splat) has peaked. Even a derailed train has a lot of momentum, so people will still be talking about Web services in 2007. However, nobody will be listening. Enterprises have absorbed as much Web services machinery as they're able to stomach. Web Services Description Language (WSDL) and SOAP 1.2 are the end of the line. Many enterprises won't even get that far. WS-Choreography, WS-Transport, WS-Reliability, WS-Security, WS-Resource, WS-ServiceGroup, WS-BaseFaults, WS-Messaging, WS-KitchenSink, and WS-AreYouEvenStillReadingThis won't leave the station. There is a limit to how much complexity any organization can manage, and WS-* has long since exceeded that threshold.

Instead, look for the emergence of Plain Old XML (POX). People will start (in many cases, continue) sending XML documents over HTTP. Authentication, caching, and reliable delivery will be managed using the built-in functionality of HTTP. Applications will be hooked together with a mixture of XSLT, XProc, duct tape, and spackle. Developers will give up on the idea of assembling services and systems without manual configuration (a dream most of them never bought into in the first place). Service-oriented architecture (SOA) might have a role to play, if any of the architecture astronauts pushing it come down to earth long enough to explain what they're doing.

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The browser wars continue

The Mozilla project will release Firefox 3. Firefox will finally pass the Acid2 test for CSS2 compliance, leaving Internet Explorer as the last major browser to fail it. However, Firefox won't yet add native support for XForms. That will have to wait until next year.

Apple will release Safari 3 along with Leopard. Although it will focus mostly on Apple proprietary extensions, Safari 3 will add support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for the first time.

Internet Explorer 7 will make Web developers' jobs easier, but not easier enough. Internet Explorer 8 won't be out in time to make a difference. Internet Explorer will continue to lose market share to both Firefox and Safari. Its market share will drop below 70% by the end of the year and will be below 50% in at least one, probably several, Western European countries.

XHTML2, HTML 5, Web Forms 2.0, and CSS3 won't be finished in 2007. Although pieces of HTML 5 and Web Forms 2.0 will be implemented by browsers with small market shares, most innovation in Web applications will continue to come from Ajax and server-side frameworks.

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XML backlash and the counterrevolution

In 2007, alternative, non-XML formats will continue to gain ground among developers with simple problems in constrained environments. In particular, Web programmers will still be enamored of JavaScript Serialized Object Notation (JSON). However, early adopters moving on to more complex problems will begin to realize they're reinventing large parts of XML. I also predict at least one major security breach as a direct result of passing JSON data to the eval() function.

The W3C will release a draft binary encoding of the XML infoset. However, the promised performance, speed, and battery life gains won't materialize outside of contrived benchmarks. The vendors who really can't live with XML won't be able to stomach binary XML either. They will end up designing their own formats. Eventually, everyone else will give up on the pipe dream of binary XML and learn to love text (but not by the end of 2007).

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Summary

2007 is shaping up to be a very interesting year for XML. XQuery is finally ready for production, and APP is ready to break out. If I were looking to invest money or time in XML in 2007, these are the technologies I'd focus on.

XForms is on a slower, more linear growth curve. However, it's definitely coming up in the world. The same is true for browsers, which have become mature, reliable technology. There'll be new billion-dollar businesses on the Web in 2007, and most of them will use XML. However, they'll be driven by the content and the ideas for the Web applications, not by the underlying technology.

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The real story for 2007 will be the continued migration to open, accessible data formats. Whether the customers' documents are stored in a file system or an XML database is a secondary question. The key is that it will be XML, and document owners will be able to process it and manage it with their preferred tools. The days when software vendors could lock up users' data with nary a peep from their customers are over.

XML is no longer the sexy new technology it once was. It has increasingly become a boring part of the infrastructure. However, that's a far more important role to play. The question that must be answered is no longer "Why XML?" but "Why not XML?" XML is the default choice for data. It isn't always the right answer; but it's right more often than it's wrong; and in 2007, that will be more true than ever.

Resources

Learn

Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (Joel Spolsky, April 2001): If "architecture astronauts" is a new phrase to you, read Joel's diagnosis.
An introduction to XQuery (Howard Katz, developerWorks, January 2006): Look at the W3C's proposed standard for an XML query language, including background history, a road map into the documentation, and a snapshot of the current state of the specification.
Atom Publishing Protocol (APP): Read draft 12 of the APP, an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources that is based on HTTP transport of Atom-formatted representations.
Why XForms? (Elliotte Rusty Harold, developerWorks, October 2006): Discover which problems XForms are intended to solve, including internationalization, accessibility, and device independence
Is Open XML a one way specification for most people? (Bob Sutor's Open Blog, October 2006): See why Bob thinks the Office Open XML specification is a one-way spec for most people.
XML 2006 trip report (Elliotte Rusty Harold, developerWorks, December 2006): In this summary of the XML 2006 conference, find that a few topics stand out, including XQuery, native XML databases, the Atom Publishing Protocol, Web 2.0, and the extraction of implicit metadata from data.
XML in 2006 (Elliotte Rusty Harold, developerWorks, January 2007): Look back at XML with the author's review of notable happenings in the world of XML this past year.
IBM XML certification: Find out how you can become an IBM-Certified Developer in XML and related technologies.
XML technical library: See the developerWorks XML Zone for a wide range of technical articles and tips, tutorials, standards, and IBM Redbooks.
developerWorks technical events and webcasts: Stay current with technology in these sessions.

Get products and technologies

eXist: Experiment with XQuery using the native XML database.
IBM trial software: Build your next development project with trial software available for download directly from developerWorks.

Discuss

Participate in the discussion forum.
developerWorks XML zone: Share your thoughts: After you've read this article, post your comments and thoughts in this forum moderated by Linda Meyer, the XML zone editor. Do you agree or disagree? Do you have other visions for what to expect for XML this year?
XML zone discussion forums: Participate in any of several XML-centered forums.
developerWorks blogs: Get involved in the developerWorks community.

About the author


		Elliotte Rusty Harold is originally from New Orleans, to which he returns periodically in search of a decent bowl of gumbo. However, he resides in the Prospect Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn with his wife Beth and cats Charm (named after the quark) and Marjorie (named after his mother-in-law). He's an adjunct professor of computer science at Polytechnic University, where he teaches Java and object-oriented programming. His Cafe au Lait Web site has become one of the most popular independent Java sites on the Internet, and his spin-off site, Cafe con Leche, has become one of the most popular XML sites. His most recent book is Java I/O, 2nd edition . He's currently working on the XOM API for processing XML, the Jaxen XPath engine, and the Jester test coverage tool.

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Ten predictions for XML in 2007

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