JD, let's look into what your friend is saying...
Cisco, Intel, HP etc. and he said that these companies are in for a rude awakening! The 2nd wave of the internet is about to get off the ground, and he said it ain't hardware driven! Bandwith, faster routers, optic switching will be an over kill.
Years ago, I started thinking (as did the company for whom I worked) felt that routers would become commodities as has other types of computing hardware. The thought was that speciality chips for routing, bridging, and switching would drive out the need for speciality microcode (basically software that runs hardware) making networking equipment basically a box of standard chips (like today's PCs) and thus driving the price down. We also believed that would clip Cisco's wings and make them nothing more than a basic box builder.
Hasn't happened... and XML is not the technology that's going to change that. (Read on...)
First, a very brief tutorial. XML is a representation language. It gives data meaning. HTML is one of many presentation languages. Others include WML and VXML. Representation tells us something about the data, for example, $9.32 is a dollar amount whereas HTML (and other presentation languages) merely tells the machine how to display $9.32. Either way, $9.32 needs to be carried over the wires (or air) when a query is issued. The difference is whether $9.32 has meaning or not.
With XML after the original request all manipulation on data would be handled by your computer, I thought the example a bit lame, but he said that the reduction in bandwidth required to perform request, multiplied by millions of users, is staggering.
OK, I understand what your friend is saying, but I disagree with his conclusion. When your computer receives an HTML document, it is a display only document and is of not much use beyond display. If your computer receives XML, the data has meaning and can be re-formatted or queried again. Keep in mind that only the data you've received thus far can be queried. Suppose you're doing a Yahoo search on "sports cars". Whether it be in HTML or XML, you only have data on sports cars and it's only useful to the point that you can subset the data; you cannot expand upon it without pulling more data across the wires. Hmmm... I can see some optimizations there, but certainly not enough to have dramatic impacts on bandwidth. Besides, in my experience, XML is a wordy language and will generally generate the same if not more bandwidth demands than HTML. (I won't get into details of how XML is displayed, but if it's done client side, it usually requires the XML data plus something called a stylesheet which is yet more bandwidth.)
That said, why would Intel be in for a rude awakening? Your friend proposes that client-side processing capabilities are one of the features of XML (and it is) which, if anything, requires more processing power on the XML side. (XML processing is not cheap, by the way.)
In my opinion, the beauty of XML is easier data interchange which should make writing middleware easier or as you say, transfer information between applications.
a network engineer for Ciena (a company I love to short!)
If your friend is representative of the typical engineer at Ciena, I think I'd stay short. No offense intended; I just think he has a very unrealistic view of XML's capabilities and what Ciena may be doing with it.
Sam |
