Re: Web services on guile

[Linas Vepstas <linasvepstas@gmail.com>]

On 23 May 2010 16:16, Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Sun 23 May 2010 11:25, Sascha Ziemann <ceving@googlemail.com> writes:.
>
> I would agree, FWIW. I wanted to implement XML-RPC at one point in
> tekuti, but decided not to after looking at the spec. An s-expression
> serializer/unserializer is fairly simply to write, you avoid
> distribution problems that way, and you also avoid impedance mismatches.

I've sometimes liked to say that whoever invented XML had
gotten an F in college when studying LISP, although perhaps
they never studied lisp at all.  I've never really figured out
whether I'm being a troll when I say that, or not.

FWIW, I've worked with a data exchange format that has
both an XML and a scheme/guile version. Running the scheme
version of the dataset through guile-1.8 (and passing it into the
C++ system that needs the data) is 3x faster than running
it through the libxerces C++ XML parser.  (I've got detailed
speeds & feeds numbers if anyone cares)  The website
for libxerces says its "high performance, modular, scalable",
which is either a bald lie hallucinated by the maintainers,
or it's true, and a testament to how slowwww XML
fundamentally is.

If you want to be vaguely standards-interoperable, JSON is
worth a look, its pretty simple & yet powerful too. Never used
it in any data-intense situation, though.

--linas