XML had its buzz periode 8 years ago, everybody rush on it to store information. It followed the hype curve, some technologies as RDBMS based on XML simply crashed, other as DTD has been replaced and finaly had been adopted by all the community.
Then it became the obvious solution to many problematics…maybe too much. I talked about this in a previous post on Why not coding in XML? (sorry about this one which in french). Coding in XML is simply a bad idea and BPEL is a good example of that overuse. I share the opinion of Jonas Fagundes when he sais in his post The misunderstood Maven:
“The weakest point in ant IMHO is to use xml to define the targets, for me xml is for data, I never liked programming in xml”
We start to see initiatives that try to readjust this.
Ant is a very good example where I think XML is not accurate. Ant is a tool that replace our old make files. Its aim is to execute commands to build a software (and much more, as deploymeny, test…etc). It is a knid of language, you have commands (functions), properties (variables), and conditional for commands (a kinf of “if” statement). Even if writting ant xml file is quit simple, for complex project with multiple tiers of different kind, and tests…this start to become a mess and you feel the need for best-practices.
I think the xml is not the right support to write code, and some open source projects goes into that direction as gant, Rake and Bake for example…this is the arrival of coding over XML…hence DSL.