>> anyone else care to share?
well i now use XML for all desktop application persistance. it just makes things way easy.
i no longer create classes that contain data elements, just classes that wrap an XML DOM Node object to provide typed get/set methods. The DOM Document tree provides my application with the data structure i used to have to code myself!
for client/server development i use it for the network protocol. sending XML messages accross sockets makes client server development a snap. Write a server in Java, write a destop client application in VC++ and focus on your buisness problems because the technical problems are already solved. The same goes for distributed solutions.
No custom parsing, no custom data formats, no worries! code all looks the same (patterns) so its easy to understand, no worries!
Need lots of XML... put it in a database and let the databases do what they do so well, for the rest let XML do what it does so well, no worries.
Need traditional database table schema... cool, generate XML from your query result sets. If your database does not support it natively, write it your self it is simple and can be done with simple generic re-usable code in any language. NO WORRIES.
We have been using it in these ways for almost 3 years now without any performance issues. We have legacy code that has grusome perfomance so XML can't possibly slow things down LOL
Is it for everyone in every application? No. It works well for us because we are not running our software on a space shuttle. -There are only 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't-
-pete