Conversation today...

Guy: "Hey I need a real quick script to pull some values out of an XML document...is that possible?"

Me: "Uh...yeah that's pretty simple if that's all it has to do."

Guy: "Ok excellent I'll send you some files and documentation."

Me: "Ok so is this like a one time use thing or do you need to parse multiple of these?"

Guy: "Actually it needs to run all the time, on this specific PC, watch directories for any files that are added, then generate a XLSX files of the values, and also log information to a database. Etc"

Me: "Oh that adds quite a bit of complexity from what you originally said. It's going to take more time."

Guy: "But you said it was easy."

Well fuck you...

The first time I use devrant, I thought "fml" is some kind of new generation markup language, like "HTML" or "XML". Until I become too curious to look for "fml" in the internet.

So, I make this and leave it here as reference for future generation...

The GET /users endpoint will return a page of the first 13 users by default.

To request other pages, add |-separated querystring with the limit and offset, as roman numerals enclosed in double quotation marks. Response status is always equal to 200, plus the total count of the resource, or zero when there's an error.

You can include an array of friends of the user in the result by setting the request header "friends" to the base64-encoded value of the single white pixel png.

Other metadata is not included by default in responses, but can be requested by appending ?meta.json to any endpoint, which will return an xml response.

If you want to update the user's profile picture, you can request an OAuth token per fax machine, followed by a pigeon POST capsule containing a filename and a rolled up Polaroid picture. The status code attached to the return postal dove will be the decimal ASCII code for a happy smiley on success, and a sad smiley if any field fails form validation.

-- Every single external REST API I've ever worked with.

Job Ad says "Web Developer". Requested skills were HTML, CSS, PHP & XML. Go to interview & get grilled about my design skills. Web Developer != Web Designer people! Get it together! 🙄🙄🙄

A Java Development vacancy I came across today:

Requirements:

Must:

° Appropriate Education
° Work Experience with Java/Javascript knowledge, at least 2 years, good understanding of OOP, patterns
° Experience with Spring, NoSQL(MongoDB)

Preferably:

° Experience with Tomcat/Jboss/Glassfish
° JDBC, JSF, JSP, JSTL, Angular, ExtJS
° HTML5, CSS3, XML, Jquery, Bootstrap, Primefaces
° Hibernate
° Git/SVN

Objective:

° Implementation of specific requirements
° Cooperation with business analytics and clarification of reuirements
° Participation in the development of application architecture and technology selection

Who are they hiring?

My little brother (still in school , learning security and pen testing): i found a bug in a website , it returns an xml file instead of the web page , i reported it to them and i think i'm gonna get rewarded like 2k $ for it .
Me : cool ! Show me .
Him : shows me his phone ...
Me : wait , gotta rant this .

And then my lecturer said JSON and XML are the same thing.

I finally built a new PC with 8GB memory, i7 4790K and SSD for OS.

My old system was a core2duo with 2GB memory. Android studio used to take 20mins for gradle sync and another 20min for signing apks. "Live preview" and "emulator" was a thing of the future for me. Never used it.

But now things have changed. This thing boots up in less than 5 sec and studio gradle takes less than 30sec. I'm so happy right now! Its like a dream come true! *cries in happiness*

Just a little bit of venting from me (written in GT for speed):

>be me
>apply for a programming job at a local company
>interviewer says that he's impressed with my resume and says that he'll call me
>one week later
>"hey anon, drop by our office, you're hired!"
>hot diggity damn!
>papers say that it's a help desk job
>"oh don't worry about it, it's just that we don't have a programming sector yet"
>wtf the job offer was for programmers but w/e a job is a job is a job
>start working there. Really mineal shit like fixing entries on SQL, resetting modems, etc.
>decide to write a couple of scripts for more mechanical tasks such as gathering .xml for the accountant
>everything is peaches and gravy
>one day the boss calls me into his office
>"hey anon, you're fired!"
>ask him why
>tells me my coworkers ratted me out on the scripts, says that I'm cheating on the job
>ni🅱️🅱️a wut???
>try to explain myself to him but he won't listen
>get fired after 4 months of being the most productive member of the team

That serves me right for trying to be good at my shitty ass job. Oh well.

You know what's funny?

Being called Jason.

Developers when talking about APIs and similar stuff: "So if you connect to our API you can get XML or JSON-" <pause>
<looks at me with a smirk like "haha! JSON/JASON LOL!">
<I gently smile like saying "yes. yes. I know. Thank you">

Sigh

JsonX is a an IBM standard to represent JSON in XML...

Like wtf dude? What's the point in making shit even more verbose than the original XML ?

Wanted me to encrypt CSS with XML

XML sucks. Why can't we just use JSON everywhere?

Friend: "Does JSON internally use XML" 🤔?

Me: 😑

Translating things:
ME: "Hey dev, can you send me a xml file of strings to translate so you can impleme..."
DEV: "yea yea tomorrow"

He sent a .docx file.

i'm crying

"XML is like violence – if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it." - Unknown

What retarted way of writing xml files is this.

Burn this before it lays eggs.

A recruiter called me today. I had to barracade myself in the laundry room to hear him, and still needed to ask him to repeat himself 7-8 times. he spoke at what must have been 15% volume with a super thick Indian accent. He also couldn't pronounce a full third of the terms.

Here's how it went.

recruiter: you full-stack dev? what experience?
me: yes, about 8 years, maybe 10.
recruiter: you know C#?
me: no.
recruiter: you know java? tomcat? spring?
me: no, I don't know Java.
recruiter: you know react? angular? apache? node?xml? json? html?
me: yes. yes, angular 1. yes, yes, ...
recruiter: ok, i email you java job posting
me: I don't know java.
recruiter: ok, i email you.

Recruiter used "email java job posting." It wasn't very effective.
Recruiter moves quickly! Recruiter used "did you get my email? email" immediately after. It was super effective! @Root becomes angered!

Recruiter calls.
Recruiter calls.
@Root becomes enraged!

Recruiter calls.
recruiter: what [???] [?] [???] [??] java [???] [??] [???] okay
recruiter: You know C#?
me: No, I still don't know C#.
recruiter: ok thank you for time. 😡 *click*

What just happened?
I really don't understand their species.

I wanted you to notice that XHR (XML HTTP Request) is an acronym composed by two other acronyms and a word. Thank you for the attention

People bashing JS and PHP while I wonder why XML still exist.

The time my Java EE technology stack disappointed me most was when I noticed some embarrassing OutOfMemoryError in the log of a server which was already in production. When I analyzed the garbage collector logs I got really scared seeing the heap usage was constantly increasing. After some days of debugging I discovered that the terrible memory leak was caused by a bug inside one of the Java EE core libraries (Jersey Client), while parsing a stupid XML response. The library was shipped with the application server, so it couldn't be replaced (unless installing a different server). I rewrote my code using the Restlet Client API and the memory leak disapperead. What a terrible week!

They really got the keywords on point...
Thank you for making my day npm

*reads JSON license*
"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."

Well that's actually a nice license.. if only nuclear research etc could be licensed like that.

Wait actually.. WanBLowS is using XML for its "diagnostic data", right? I always found it so weird that they don't use JSON for that.. but I guess that this is why 🙃

i just recently got how correct that is while working on a project with multiple people

I love to take notes in markdown format. I use markdown for almost anything. I even write quiz for my students in markdown.

It is really painful to copy-paste so many questions & answers into moodle. To be honest, I hate moodle UI. But it is the most popular and easiest solution for e-learning.

So I spend some minutes to curse moodle, 2 hours to build a program to convert markdown into xml. And another 1 day to make LaTeX and image works.

I still hate moodle UI. But at least I don't need to deal with it for a long time. Just import the xml, create the quiz, and done :)

Ah, the program was written in Python. I really miss the old time when Python was cool, and javascript was nothing without JQuery....

No promise, no callback, just code it and run it :)

Fuck XML. Fuck it right up it's X with it's M, all the way to L.

Slowly getting there :-)

Client: "Hey we want you to integrate your product with our system."
Me: "Oh, OK. Where's your API?"
Client: "Here! We even have an outdated .Net SDK, we use XML."
Me: "Ok.. how do we authenticate? What's your OAuth 2.0 endpoint?"
Client: "O auth what?"
Me: " You know, the current standard for REST API authentication and authorisation"
Client: " What's REST?"
*Hungs up*

This guy is supposed to be a "spring framework guru"

Yo Mr. Guru, this is not how you write a pom file especially when you are teaching someone who probably is new to programming. Just think if the new guy/girl goes on to write such xml files in the future. What are you even trying to do man.

To the person who architected a system where business logic is encoded to XML within CDATA sections within other XML data inside a 10000 line file that also describes the presentation of this same data:

I hope you meet a violent death. Your suffering should be equal to what developers who had to deal with your perverted shit experienced.

Motherfucker.

Imagine, you get employed to restart a software project. They tell you, but first we should get this old software running. It's 'almost finished'.
A WPF application running on a soc ... with a 10" touchscreen on win10, a embedded solution, to control a machine, which has been already sold to customers. You think, 'ok, WTF, why is this happening'?
You open the old software - it crashes immediately.
You open it again but now you are so clever to copy an xml file manually to the root folder and see all of it's beauty for the first time (after waiting for the freezed GUI to become responsive):
* a static logo of the company, taking about 1/5 of the screen horizontally
* circle buttons
* and a navigation interface made in the early 90's from a child
So you click a button and - it crashes.
You restart the software.
You type something like 'abc' in a 'numberfield' - it crashes.
OK ... now you start the application again and try to navigate to another view - and? of course it crashes again.
You are excited to finally open the source code of this masterpiece.

Thank you jesus, the 'dev' who did this, didn't forget to write every business logic in the code behind of the views.
He even managed to put 6 views into one and put all their logig in the code behind!
He doesn't know what binding is or a pattern like MVVM.
But hey, there is also no validation of anything, not even checks for null.
He was so clever to use the GUI as his place to save data and there is a lot of parsing going on here, every time a value changes.
A thread must be something he never heard about - so thats why the GUI always freezes.

You tell them: It would be faster to rewrite the whole thing, because you wouldn't call it even an alpha. Nobody listenes.
Time passes by, new features must be implemented in this abomination, you try to make the cripple walk and everyone keeps asking: 'When we can start the new software?' and the guy who wrote this piece of shit in the first place, tries to give you good advice in coding and is telling you again: 'It was almost finished.' *facepalm*
And you? You would like to do him and humanity a big favour by hiting him hard in the face and breaking his hands, so he can never lay a hand on any keyboard again, to produce something no one serious would ever call code.

Woah there, friend

For a week+ I've been listening to a senior dev ("Bob") continually make fun of another not-quite-a-senior dev ("Tom") over a performance bug in his code. "If he did it right the first time...", "Tom refuses to write tests...that's his problem", "I would have wrote the code correctly ..." all kinds of passive-aggressive put downs. Bob then brags how without him helping Tom, the application would have been a failure (really building himself up).
Bob is out of town and Tom asked me a question about logging performance data in his code. I look and see Bob has done nothing..nothing at all to help Tom. Tom wrote his own JSON and XML parser (data is coming from two different sources) and all kinds of IO stream plumbing code.
I use Visual Studio's feature create classes from JSON/XML, used the XML Serialzier and Newtonsoft.Json to handling the conversion plumbing.
With several hundred of lines gone (down to one line each for the XML/JSON-> object), I wrote unit tests around the business transaction, integration test for the service and database access. Maybe couple of hours worth of work.
I'm 100% sure Bob knew Tom was going in a bad direction (maybe even pushing him that direction), just to swoop in and "save the day" in front of Tom's manager at some future point in time.

This morning's standup ..
Boss: "You're helping Tom since Bob is on vacation? What are you helping with?"
Me: "I refactored the JSON and XML data access, wrote initial unit and integration tests. Tom will have to verify, but I believe any performance problem will now be isolated to the database integration. The problem Bob was talking about on Monday is gone. I thought spending time helping Tom was better than making fun of him."
<couple seconds of silence>
Boss:"Yea...want to let you know, I really, really appreciate that."

Bob, put people first, everyone wins.

Fuck XML.

Just... Fuck it, i'm fucking done.

I bet you put a JSON inside an XML

When somebody says they know how to program and I ask them what languages they know and they say XML, CSS, HTML.

So I tried to start learning Spring 5

How the fuck do you guys do it? Holy shit.

30 seconds in:

"Spring really isn't hard, you start with this request handler interacting with a view parser..."

Alright, sounds good

2 minutes in:

"So in order to use SpringResponseDriverActionHandlerServiceRequesterService you'll need to import com.org.java.spring.util.driver.comagain.request.response.request.drivers and include this 37 level deep nested XML property and finally extend this abstract class and implement it over an iterable list with this specific annotation aaaaaaand.... Done"

> Hello, world!

"See, spring is easy!"

Pro tip: if you want to day dream at work just open a complicated XML file in your IDE and stare at it intensely any time someone walks past your desk.

Puns for days

Seriously? Why choose xml rather than json? json is easier to handle people!

A colleague of mine from the administration department suddenly enters my room where my team and me are all busy and, without considering I'm talking with someone else, interrupts us.
he: "I needed to call you but your phone is in do-not-disturb mode"
me: "that's because I'm busy working on something urgent and I don't want to be disturbed"
he: "but I need your help!"
me: "we're working on a urgent thing, but, anyway, what's the problem"
he: "I need help with digital invoicing"
me: "I deal with programming, I don't think I can help..."
he (interrupting): "I created a digital invoice but I need to send a printable version to a customer"
me: "digital invoices should be XML files so you can't simply take the file's content and paste into Word and print..."
he: "in fact that's what I did and the result was horrible"
me: "I was saying just that. I'm sure, anyway, there should be some online tool for producing a well-formatted PDF from a digital invoice"
he doesn't say anything
me: "you can try with a search on Google..."
he: "but I'm not an IT guy, that's not my business"
me: "this has nothing to do with programming, you simply need to find a tool online for doing this"
he (disappointed): "ok, but this is computer stuff, I'll try..."

Thug life

How I discovered I was a developer:

The company had hired a pair of computer science graduates and we had been commissioned to build a magento store. Weeks went buy with limited progress, and missing functionality was met with protestations from the devs about unreasonable demands.

At this time I had been taken on as a designer / casual front end developer (though the focus was on design). I knew HTML, CSS and some very limited php and js.

We were severely over deadline, and seeing the desperation on people's faces I suggested looking into it.

I read the magento docs, got an install up an running, configured an installed plugins, integrated the theme using the complex multilevelled XML/phtml architecture magento uses and even got some of the more complex js functionality working using JavaScript.

In two weeks.

I'm now the lead developer

Just saying 🙄

Yo mama so fat, her layout_width="match_parent"

I swear I work with mentally deranged lunatics.
Dev is/was using TFS's web api to read some config stuff..

Ralph: "Ugh..this is driving me crazy. I've spent all day trying to read this string from TFS and it is not working"
Me: "Um, reading a string from an web api is pretty easy, what's the problem?"
Ralph: "I'm executing the call in a 'using' statement and cannot return the stream."
Me: "Why do you need to return a stream? Return the object you are looking for."
Ralph: "Its not that easy. You can return anything from TFS. All you get back is a stream. Could be XML, JSON, text file, image, anything."
Me: "What are you trying to return?"
Ralph: "XML config. If I use XDoc, the stream works fine, but when I step into each byte from the stream, I the first three bytes have weird characters. I shouldn't have to skip the first three bytes to get the data. I spent maybe 5 hours yesterday digging around the .Net stream readers used in XDoc trying to figure out how it skips the first few bytes."
Me: "Wow...I would have used XDoc and been done and not worried about that other junk."
Ralph: "But I don't know the stream is XML. That's what I need to figure out."
Me: "What is there to figure out? You do know. Its your request. You are requesting a XML config."
Ralph: "No, the request can be anything. What if Sam requests an image? XDoc isn't going to work."
Me: "Is that a use-case? Sam requesting an image?"
Ralph: "Uh..I don't know...he could"
Me: "Sounds like your spending a lot of time doing premature optimization. You know what your accessing TFS for, if it's XML, return XML. If it's an image, return an image. Something new comes along, modify the code to handle it. Eazy peezy."
<boss walks in from a meeting>
Boss: "Whats up guys?"
Ralph: "You know the problem with TFS and not being able to stream the data I had all day yesterday? I finally figured it out. I need to keep this TFS reader simple. I'll start with the XML configs and if we more readers later, we can add them."
Boss: "Oh yea, always start simple and add complexity only when you need it."

Frack...Frack..Frack...you played some victim complaining to anyone who would listen yesterday (which I mostly ignored) about reading data from TFS was this monumental problem no one could solve, then you start complaining to me, I don't fall for the BS, then tell the boss the solution was your idea?

Lunatic or genius? Wally would be proud.

Yesterday in a job interview the guy asked me at least five times if I knew how to program in XML.... FOR GOD SAKE DO YOUR HOMEWORK!!!

Fuck the way comments work in xml. I want to write a 2 word comment but before that I apparently have to make an ascii art mona lisa. Infront of and after the comment.

I work at a place where security is really high when it comes to server access. Today I was in urgent need to get admin access to a server, this is a real pain. Luckily I found an xml in version control containing the credentials for the web application which happens to be an admin account! Lucky me, saved me at least two weeks of waiting to get admin access!

When api supports only XML!!!

The proprietary API I have to use which uses XML but is totally dynamic and without a schema. They basically managed to successfully merge JSON and XML to get the disadvantages of both JSON and XML.

Spent 10 minutes starting to implement XML serialization in my old app... and then realize i already implemented it.

That moment you realise that naming classes by their XML data structure is not as practicle as you hoped it was... 🤔

In a meeting the vice president of IT asked me “How long would it take you to re-write our CRM in XML?”
I responded “I’ll have it done by the end of the day if you can tell me what XML stands for.”
VP walked out of the meeting not saying a word.

Going to bed without being able to resolve a bug. Expecting zero sleep...

Makes me giggle every time

Is it me or all REST api use json today ?
And xml is kinda dead ?

I always feel awful when I see an xml rest api.

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

Why the fuck would you use xml to store data

Why the fuck would you use xmdsaasd to build your site

Mysql and php exist for a fucking reason

Are you serious, is this an exam revision or an eyesight test

Aye so i got a new job, and its android. I thought "yeah sure, ive been a java dev my whole life, it will be easy".

And it is easy.

But its like a fleshed out java, with a trillion built in classes and xml (seroiusly, fuck xml), and also the studio eats away my ram.

Hey I got reminded of a funny story.

A friend of mine and me were in internships in the same company. The company was specialized in territory resources management (managing water for agriculture, money to build industrial zones...). He got the interesting internship (water predictory modeling) and I got... The repairs of a reference sheet manager that never happened to work. It was in C# and ASP.NET and I was in second year of CS. I expected the code to be nice and clear since it was made by a just graduated engineer with +5years of studies.

I was very wrong.

This guy may never have touched a web server in his life, used static variables to keep sessions instead of... well... sessions, did code everything in the pages event handlers (even LinQ stuff et al) and I was told to make it maintainable, efficient and functional in 2 months. There were files with +32k LoC.

After 1week of immense despair, I decided I will refactor all the code. Make nice classes, mapping layer, something close to a MVC... So I lost time and got scoled for not being able to make all the modifications as fast as in a cleanly designed code...

After 4 weeks, everything was refactored and I got to wait for the design sheets to change some crystal report views.

At this moment I began to understand were was the problem in this company.

My friend next door got asked to stop his modeling stuff for an emergency project. He had to make an XML converter for our clients to be able to send decentralized electrics bills, and if it was not completed within a week, they would no longer be able to pay until it is done.

This XML converter was a project scheduled 5 years before that. Nobody wanted to do it.

At the same time, I was waiting for the Com Department to give me the design views.

I never saw the design views. Spent one month implementing a golden ratio calculator with arbitrary precision because they ain't give me anything to do until the design were implemented.

Ended with a poor grade because "the work wasn't finished".

I really need to let this out somewhere...

Why the f...? Srsly.. Why would anyone do that? I'm joining another project. Apparently lead dev has adopted a coding style, where:

1. Every dev writes code however he likes, i.e. no clean-code requirement at all.
2. All services are crud-only. I mean all service classes. All must have those 4 methods; no more, no less.
3. Half of the business logic is inside controllers.
4. Not a single comment... Interfaces, models, etc. -- not a single one.
5. Xmls -- tabs, classes - spaces.
6. Xml schemas are downloaded with each build rather than stored downloaded once and stored locally.
7. I can keep going on and on.

Is it just me or are these some really weird decisions?

!rant

One day Boss was doing code review of my work
Boss to me: What the fuck dev1!?!? All efforts I spent to quit smoking and your XML routine gave me cancer anyway!

Another day, a colleague needed to make change to a program that hasn't been changed in looong time and sees a commit from our Boss done 15yrs ago!!!

Dev2 to Boss: Boss this signal catching routine sucks dicks! How did you become a our Boss?
Me to dev2: He sucked as many dicks as his routine did
Boss to us: Oh look! Performance appraisal is due this week. Bye-bye 7.5%

Here 7.5% referring to pay raise that is average pay raise

TIL that some people don't use JSON to exchange data over the Internet. In fact, they don't use XML either. Or even HTTP at all.

Some people use flat text files with 4-charater codes to denote "objects" delimited by astresks to denote properties, then upload these flat files over FTP.

My portal to 1995 grows deeper. Send help, please. Or at least whiskey...

650 line hand constructed xml file missing a tag. Took me 3 hours to find. I looked at the section at least 3 times but my brain would not pick out the mistake. Online cal validators all pointing me to the wrong places.
It takes persistence to be a developer so pat yourselves on the back.

Whoever thought setting up SQL database connections through XML was a good idea needs to be put on trial. And then exiled to a deserted island so they can think about all the pain they put me through.

Okay, here we go...

I need a new Programming language.

Coming from a Python background, so go easy on me. x.x

C# can do what I need, but it's quite complex for me. I'd rather something simplier is possible.

Brief summery:
So, I've come to realize that I wont be able to make my Python game(ExitCode) as powerful and fancy as I'd like. And I decided that I should just start from scratch before I go any farther. (Though, I might go ahead and stabilize the current versions on GitHub)

Here's what I need:

Powerful UI support;
* I am re-creating an OS as my game. I will need to drag and position windows and icons in-game, as you would in a real OS.
* Needs to support Ads, Animations, Images, Videos, Sound, and any other media I might need?
* Preferably can render HTML & CSS (Though, this is just a preference)

Support for reading JSON and/or XML files SAFELY (XML had major vulnerabilities in Python)

Supports Windows, but I would prefer cross-platform-ability

Easy to compile

I am not really looking for a game ENGINE. I am looking for a language to create a game in from scratch, that has powerful UI libraries.

In the end, the game will be Free, and Open Source. (Always!~)

And this is how to read a book in Visual Studio at work so everyone thinks you are in some really fucked up configuration xml.... :))))))) Thanks xmlrant.com and jsrant.com for ideas

At work the other day...

Guy: "Oh hey I was thinking if you could help me with an application to visualize some data."

Me: "Ooookay...what did you have in mind?"

Guy: "I think we have XML files that could be turned into graphs...oh and we could add some trend lines. (Getting more excited) And maybe we could supplement it with live data...oh hey and maybe we could add real time alerts via email..."

Me: *thinks to self...there is no way in hell I am starting to work on something that he is literally coming up with requirements as he's talking* "I need specifics...so go take some time, think it through and get back to me with concrete details and examples."

Guy: "Ok. That should be enough to get you started for now at least."

That would be a big fuck no, good sir. Haven't started and won't start it. He has never mentioned it to me again since then.

Dear Gradle,
I just modified a single attribute value in an XML. Please!!
You just built the whole thing a few minutes ago.. Why do you wanna... Oh well...

Gradle build running....

HOLY.

CHRIST.

MAVEN.

Where has this thing been all my life. I can manage my Java web projects from a single repository that works native with Linux. No more hunting for .jar files on the web, EVERYTHING IS MANAGED FROM A SINGLE .XML FILE. MAVEN WORKS WITH ANY JAVA IDE.

This is one of the single greatest systems I have ever found.

Learning mobile development so far has been 5% writing code and 95% screaming at .XML documents. It's been 8 hours of work and all I have to show for it is a few buttons and a really shitty UI

Your data is formatted according to some ISO? Nice. You say it's easy to use and well documented? Great!

IT'S FUCKING FORMATTED WITH IRREGULAR SPACING??

What the fuck is this formatting?

Date <tab> Word <3 spaces> Some conjugated version <ONE space> Type <FIVE spaces> gender

WHAT
WHY
WHY ISNT IT XML
WHY ISNT IT JSON
WHY THE TABULATOR AND IRREGULAR SPACES
WHY DOES THE ORDER CHANGE PER LINE
WHY IS THIS IN A SINGLE 1MIL LINE FILE

help the university of oslo makes me dysphoric in their dictionaries i really dont want to parse this

That sounds like a very sad position...

AirFrance, you suck

Today's project was answering the question: "Can I update tables in a Microsoft Word document programmatically?"

(spoiler: YES)

My coworker got the ball rolling by showing that the docx file is just a zip archive with a bunch of XML in it.

The thing I needed to update were a pair of tables. Not knowing anything about Word's XML schema, I investigated things like:
- what tag is the table declared with?
- is the table paginated within the table?
- where is the cell background color specified?

Fortunately this wasn't too cumbersome.

For the data, CSV was the obvious choice. And I quickly confirmed that I could use OpenCSV easily within gradle.

The Word XML segments were far too verbose to put into constants, so I made a series of templates with tokens to use for replacement.

In creating the templates, I had to analyze the word xml to see what changed between cells (thankfully, very little). This then informed the design of the CSV parsing loops to make sure the dynamic stuff got injected properly.

I got my proof of concept working in less than a day. Have some more polishing to do, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results!

Just heard someone pronounce XML as "saml" today.

Is this how the other half lives?

Hitting the deadline rush with my university projects now, it's putting me all over the place jumping between C++ & OpenGL, C# in Unity and Java/XML for Android development, one thing at a time would be nice! Also first post, hello community :)

TL:DR
Why do so shitty "API"s exist that are even harder to write than proper ones? D:

Trying to hack my venilation at home.
This API is so horrible D:
The API is only based on POST requests no matter if you want to write values or get values and the response only contains XML with cryptic values like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<PARAMETER>
<LANG>de</LANG>
<ID>v01306</ID>
<VA>00011100000000000000000010000001</VA>
<ID>v00024</ID>
<VA>0</VA>
<ID>v00033</ID>
<VA>2</VA>
<ID>v00037</ID>
<VA>0</VA>

Also there are multiple API routes like
POST /data/werte1.xml
POST /data/werte2.xml
POST /data/werte3.xml
POST /data/werte4.xml
And actually the real API route is only given in the request body and not in the path.

Why is this so shitty? D:<

Btw in terms of security this is also top notch. It just globally saves if one computer sends the login password.
I mean why even ask for a password then? D:
That made me end up with a cronjob to send a login request so I don't have to login on any device.

PS:
You see, great piece of German engineering.

[Background]
My father works as a hardware developer in a medium-large company.

We(dad+me) also design and build test equipment to be used at said company.
Usually, these are Arduino controlled pieces of harware. I write the code for these projects.

[END BACKGROUND]

One of these projects had a simple communication system over serial(human readable commands).
I wrote a simple WinForms application (which loads a config XML and has a GUI to send these commands), because appearantly it's too hard for SOFTWARE DEVELOPERS(who are writing code for the device, which the test equipment is for) to use hyperterm(or some other serial monitor) to control it, when given a step by step maunal.

I get complaints, that this application(img) is 'not working' or 'too hard to use'. I works perfectly.
All you have to do is:
1. select com port(to wich the device is connected)
2. press connect; wat until it says "connected" After that, the option to "load config file" unlocks.
3. now, select the file(press '...' for openFileDialog) and press load.
4. Now the deafult settings are send immediatly. You can then, select the options from the list on the left, and change them with the radio buttons. The changes are automatically sent.

All these morons seem to be able to do is:
1. check the "expert mode" checkbox(opens up more options(unnecessary for their use case))
2. mess it up
3. complain

My father often complains, how bad the software devs(at that office) are.
They are (almost all, some exeptions) incompetent pieces of shit from India, who take age to do anything.
I had to look at some CVs and Resumés of them(both SW and HW). ( My father is the team leader and head HW dev and had to hire an HW dev They were full of bullshit and spelling errors, bad language and more.

Tl;Dr; Wrote software for use in my dad's company, software devs to stupid to use it.

I have to write an xml configuration parser for an in-house data acquisition system that I've been tasked with developing.

I hate doing string parsing in C++... Blegh!

Can someone please build an SVG vector file format equivalent that uses json instead of xml? k thnx! 😆

Working with Android DatePicker is such a pain in the ass.

You want to have your DatePicker appearing as a SpinnerView? Well, easy!

If you're under API 21, you can use the following method 'setSpinnerViewShown()'. If you're between API 21 and API 23 you need to add some style configuration. And if you're above of API 23 you can't use both of the methods above, you need to create a custom xml with the attribute "datePickerMode" (no, datePickerMode can't be set programmatically, it would be too easy to guess).

If you want to add a listener to it, you think it might be a method called 'setDateChangeListener' or something like this? Well no! You must use the 'init(year, month, day, Listener)' method, logic!

If you think you're finished with this bullshit, of course not. Their is a known bug on API 21 that you must take into account (but this bug isn't fixed, no, it's just documented somewhere on google forums).

I don't know the team that designed the DatePicker for Android, but it might a team of champanzee that randomly changed their minds to the phases of the moon!

So a non-tech colleague just walked in and asked if it was possible to find and replace "level 1" for a star in 200 .docx files. Considering the fact docx is xml I thought it shouldn't be too hard to do this. I received her email... Including the FF-ing star as a png image! Here i thought she meant a *. Ah.. Hell no!
ʕノ•ᴥ•ʔノ ︵ ┻━┻

(After several hours of debugging a returned "mal formed xml" error)

Me: We found out your api does accept our XML only if its elements are in certain order.

They: Oh! yes. :)

Me: ... and since XML should not depend on order, maybe you should fix that. Or at least alert about it in docs.

They: Yes, maybe we should. :)

Me: ... OK

There are two types of eXtensible people
<UserInfo type="address">101 Terrace Road</UserInfo>

And

<Address>101 Terrace Road</Address>

I saw someone rant about XML earlier, but truly the thing that puts me on the edge is XSLT. Who invented that crap.

Okay, so I have to write a script that will get user data from an AD, additional information from an XML, combine those two to get boss user relationship and output that mess into an excel sheet.
Oh, and both sources are ofc completely inconsistent. So I need full error handling on everything.
Aaaaaaand I have to write it in VB script... Using np++... Without plugins...
I hate my life!

Why do XML API-s still exist? WHY? It's like walking up to a hot chick hoping to get a number, but she turns around and smiles with no teeth.

After an extensive amout of time debugging xml I learned that height is spelled with an e.

Had to consume a soap webservice which spits out a XML of 5000 lines with ambiguous node names and a shitload of data that needs to be parsed.

Built a ORM model to hold all the data and I already built a Xmlparser which works like a boss.. untill now..

I've been debugging for 3 hours, cursing every God man ever made up. Swearing at my screen like a madman... but this particular set of nodes just didn't got saved properly to the DB...

Alright, so my ORM definition is fucked... nope... Alright, so my XmlParser is fucked... nope...

Whaaaaat the fuuuuck...

Oh wait, I've been checking the wrong table for hours....

Hooray for ambiguous tables because I followed the ambiguous structure.

I am going to get drunk now.

X

XML is meant for computers to read, not humans.

It's 2016. Please use yaml instead!

They made Asynchronous Javascript and XML a real thing LMAO!! 😂😂😂

Xcode storyboard sucks!. At least it could've had a code version of the storyboards (like android XML layouts) so that at least you could properly copy paste a layout from somewhere. Autolayouts and constraints are so flipping confusing that I almost always end up doing all the layouts in the code itself.

I came from Android, in the xml you can put simply "match_parent" or "wrap_content", or align right or left.

Then I tried to use Xcode interface builder for iOS. now I am sad and feeling bad. why Apple, why

I have come across the most frustrating error i have ever dealt with.
Im trying to parse an XML doc and I keep getting UnauthorizedAccessException when trying to load the doc. I have full permissions to the directory and file, its not read only, i cant see anything immediately wrong as to why i wouldnt be able to access the file.
I searched around for hours yesterday trying a bunch of different solutions that helped other people, none of them working for me.
I post my issue on StackOverflow yesterday with some details, hoping for some help or a "youre an idiot, Its because of this" type of comment but NO.
No answers.
This is the first time Ive really needed help with something, and the first time i havent gotten any response to a post.
Do i keep trying to fix this before the deadline on Sunday? Do i say fuck it and rewrite the xml in C# to meet my needs? Is there another option that i dont even know about yet?
I need a dev duck of some sort :/

I never thought to I'd say this about an open-source project, but if I wanted to single out an unbeatable case of "Bad Design", and the manifestation of the term "Redundancy Hell", It is definitely Calibre.

Single job: To keep some e-book files + some metadata.
What it does in brief: In a single dir as your library; From metadata stored IN each file; It generates subdirs <author_name>/<title_name>(<some_numerical_id>), copies the e-book file there, generates a jpg cover from the first page and also stores it there, generates an xml file to support legacy e-book formats (but it generates it anyway even for pdfs), which contains all the same metadata for the file, including title, author and href for the cover, and also stores it there. And then, all the same metadata for all books is stored in a metadata.db in the library root folder. I don't know if there is more data stored/used somewhere in a more obfuscated way.

Not too much to ask: Change some author/title/any single field.
What is done: 💩🌋

It is so helpful, it does all the stuff by itself or its plugins; you don't have to touch anything. But it also has this amazing ability to fuck everything up without even being touched. I mean WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING? WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING DESIGN IS THIS? A FUCKING FRACTAL?

Literally, If I had listed all my books on physical papers with a real life pen, It would take me less time that I've already wasted on unfucking the regular disasters. Fuck you and your arrogant responses to issues.

I accidently lost a whole tables data today. Lucky me I also created a XML-file on the server which was for printing.
I parsed the files back into a simplexmlobject and recovered most of the lost data. 💪

I love xml. There. I said it. I freaking said it.

Fuck my life! I have been given a task to extract text (with proper formatting) from Docx files.
They look good on the outside but it is absolute hell parsing these files, add to these shitty XML human error and you get a dev's worst nightmare.
I wrote a simple function to extract text written in 'heading(0-9)' paragraph style and got all sorts of shit.
One guy used a table with borders colored white to write text so that he didn't have to use tabs. It is absolute bullshit.

Server configuration file formats...

some use custom text file
some use ini files,
some use xml..
some use json..
some use yaml..
some use toml..

How many file formats I need to learn!!!

Is there anything uglier than XML documentation comments? The signal to noise ratio is appalling, like an exercise in redundancy for the sake of redundancy.

/// <summary>
/// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="CipherInfo"/> class.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="keySize">Size of the key.</param>
/// <param name="cipher">The cipher.</param>
public CipherInfo(int keySize, Func<byte[], byte[], Cipher> cipher)
{ ... }

Compare that to the equivalent markdown documentation comments:
/// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="CipherInfo"/> class.
/// ##Parameters
/// - `keySize` - Size of the key.
/// - `cipher` - The cipher.
public CipherInfo(int keySize, Func<byte[], byte[], Cipher> cipher)
{ ... }

Do you know why you should never use grep when working with XML?

$ grep packet/> final.pdml
> *shit, that takes too long, ctrl+c*
$ du final.pdml
> 0 final.pdml

That's why.

Working as a part time student on an app and until now I thought I was the king of software development.
Well, fuck me and my high horse.

Today the stuff we send from the client to the server didn't arrive, so I asked the backend guy if he could take a look at the packages arriving. He did and told me the data was messed up.
I did only design stuff the last week or so, so I was very confused. After reverting back to one old commit after the other it struck me.
I still don't know how such a dumb mistake could have happened to me, the king of Android apps, but apparently I replaced all occurrences of a specific keyword in just the strings and comments of the whole project. Key became KeyList, so instead of <Keys> my XML contained <KeyList> which made no goddamn sense whatsoever.
Did I mention that we have an important deadline tomorrow? Yeah...

So now I leaned my lesson. Never trust XML.

JK I'm dumb. That's the lesson here.

First day at my internship. After an explanation of how everything works and which tools the company uses, I proceeded to setup my computer.

My first assignment was to write this dynamic thing that shows all the company's projects using an XML file with all data. I had to use the front-end the previous intern made.

So when I opened his old files, I was presented with some badly indented HTML. That's not the worst part: He mixed up rows with columns. I guess it's truly like the stories here on devRant.

Fucking hell, new API and it doesn't support JSON. WTF?

<tag attr="value" />

or

<tag attr="value"/>

It hurts my eyes, when I see the second one.

<I>
<love>
<you/>
<!-- </love> -->
</I>

Others: I can speak English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, etc...

Me: I can speak Gujarati, Hindi, English, Javascript, Php, Python, Java, XML, Rust, ReasonML, etc...

So I was helping my friend debug her code.
A portion of text was not being displayed. We put log statements everywhere. Cross checked every line of code. We had almost started to lose it.
And then we found out that she had accidentally set the text color to white in the XML layout.
Just another one of those days.

#justdevthings
That moment when you're so engrossed in your project that you lose track of time. You begin to SEE code irl, not just on screens. Things like hunger, environment and a sense of time fade away. That feeling when the code just works, but better when it doesn't and you figure out a smart fix. Oh gosh ill pay to feel like that all day.

I wrote a shitty layout for an android side project. It haunted me. I could still SEE the shitty xml long after the pc was shut down. I had a nightmare about it and woke up sweating, and all I could see was xml. Fkin xml man. I redid the layout at 3am and boy was i so satisfied.
I think that was just the tetrix effect taking its toll on me.

I always got screwed by parents for being on that machine all day, back in school. But none of that matters now. I can now feel the code running in my veins and flowing into the machine. I can now feel my heart throbbing at the sight of such beauty. They ask how i manage my social life. I say everything goes well until i start a side project, that's when social life gets fucked hard. I think I'm gonna die one day after performing the final commit.

I don't get it.
I tried Kotlin on Android just for fun, and it doesn't support binary data handling, not even unsigned types until the newest version. Java suffers from the same disease.
How does one parse and process binary data streams on such a high end system? Not everything is highlevel XML or JSON today.

And it's not only an Android issue.
Python has some support for binary data, and it's powerful, but not comfortable.
I tried Ruby, Groovy, TCL, Perl and Lua, and only Lua let's you access data directly without unnecessary overhead.
C# is also akward when it comes to data types less than the processer register width.

How hard can it be to access and manipulate data in its natural and purest form?
Why do the so called modern programming language ignore this simple aspect that is needed on an everyday basis?

Attribute "label" in element "label" in the namespace "label" in a file called "labels.xml"...
Cool, thanks for that.

So we got these webservices, that are written in XML and they needed to be parsed and converted into a JSON-model. Well...

The company that I work for has recently recruited a team for Web Development, so they don't have to pay a monthly fee to the previous team who designed their website.

They have over 3000+ products in the old website, and no logical way to import them to the new website. The old team was asking for 300$ to give them an API which would return the product details in an XML format.

Obviously, paying that amount of money wasn't logical for a dying website, so the manager decided to hire someone to manually copy the content from the old admin panel to the new one, that is until I stopped him.

My solution? Write a simple web scraper to login to the old panel and collect data. Boom! 300$ saved from going to waste.

Now, the old team found about this and as much as my manager was happy, they were quite angry. So they implanted a Google reCaptcha to prevent my bot from scraping the old panel.

I spent about 20 minutes, and found out once you're logged in to the old panel, the session is saved in a cookie and you are no longer greeted by a Captcha.

So I re-written a small portion of my bot, and Boom! Instant karma from manager. We finished publishing the new site, and notified the old team, only to see the precious look on their face. Poor guy, he thought I was a wizard or something 😂😂

That's what you get for overcharging people!

TL;DR: Company's old website team wanted to overcharge us writing an API to fetch 3000+ records.
Written a basic web scraper to do the same job in less than an hour.

So yeah XML is still not solved in year 2018. Or so did I realize the last days.
I use jackson to serialize generic data to JSON.

Now I also want to provide serialization to XML. Easy right? Jackson also provides XML serialization facitlity similar to JAXB.

Works out of the box (more or less). Wait what? *rubbing eyes*

<User>
<pk>234235</pk>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</User>

Why is my groups property (java.util.Set) rendered as two separate elements? Who the fuck every though this is the way to go?

So OK *reading the docs* there is a way to create a collection wrapper. That must be it, I thought ...

<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groups>
<groups typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groups>
</groups>
</User>

What the fuck is this now? This is still not right!!!

I know XML offers a lot of flexibility on how to represent your data. But this is just wrong ...

The only logical way to display that data is:
<User typeCode="user">
<pk>2540591810712846915</pk>
<groups>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>6356679041773291286</pk>
</groupsEntry>
<groupsEntry typeCode="usergroup">
<pk>1095682275514732543</pk>
</groupsEntry>
</groups>
</User>

It would be better if the individual entries would be just called "group" but I guess implementing such a logic would be pretty hard (finding a singular of an arbitrary word?).

So yeah theres a way for that * implementing a custom collection serializer* ... wait is that really the way to go? I mean common, am I the only one who just whants this fucking shit just work as expected, with the least amount of suprise?
Why do I have to customize that ...

So ok it renders fine now ... *writes test for it+
FUCK FUCK FUCK. why can't jackson not deserialize it properly anymore? The two groups are just not being picked up anymore ...

SO WHY, WHY WHY are you guys over at jackson, JAXB and the like not able to implement that in the right manner. AND NOT THERE IS ONLY ONE RIGHT WAY TO DO IT!

*looks at an apple PLIST file* *scratches head* OK, gues I'll stick to the jackson defaults, at least it's not as broken as the fucking apple XML:

<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>PayloadOrganization</key>
<string>Example Inc.</string>
<key>PayloadDisplayName</key>
<string>Profile Service</string>
<key>PayloadVersion</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</plist

I really wonder who at apple has this briliant idea ...

A server application pulled off some sort of listings as table. Problem was, it crashed with some thousand data files after one and a half hours. I looked into that, and couldn't stop WTFing.

A stupid server side script fetched the data in XML (WTF!) and then inserted shit node-wise (WTF!!), which was O(n^2) - in PHP and on XML! Then it converted the whole shebang into HTML for browser display although users would finally copy/paste the result into Excel anyway.

The original developer even had written a note on the application page that pulling the data "could take long". Yeah because it's so fucking STUPID that Clippy is an Einstein in comparison, that's why!

So I pulled the raw data via batch file without XML wrapping and wrote a little C program for merging the dumped stuff client-side in O(n), spitting out a final CSV for Excel import.

Instead of fucking the server for 1.5 hours and then crashing, shit is done after 7 seconds, out of which the actual data processing takes 40 bloody milliseconds!

Conversation yesterday (senior dev and the mgr)..

SeniorDev: "Yea, I told Ken when using the service, pass the JSON string and serialize to their object. JSON eliminates the data contract mismatch errors they keep running into."
Mgr: "That sounds really familiar. Didn't we do this before?"
SeniorDev: "Hmmm...no. I doubt anyone has done this before."
Me: "Yea, our business tier processor handled transactions via XML. It allowed the client and server to process business objects regardless of platform. Partners using Perl,
clients using Delphi, website using .aspx, and our SQLServer broker even used it."
Mgr: "Oh yea...why did we stop using it?"
Me: "WCF. Remember, the new dev manager at the time and his team broke up the business processor into individual WCF services."
Mgr: "Boy, that was a crap fest. We're still fighting bugs from the mobile devices. Can't wait until we migrate everything to REST."
SeniorDev: "Yea, that was such a -bleep-ing joke."
Me: "You were on Jake's team at the time. You were the primary developer in the re-write process saying passing strings around wasn't the way true object-oriented developers write code.
So it's OK now because the string is in JSON format or because using a JSON string your idea?"

SeniorDev turns around in his desk and puts his headphones back on.

That's right you lying SOB...I remember exactly the level of personal attacks you spewed on me and other developers behind our backs for using XML as the message format.

Keep your fat ass in your seat and shut the hell up.

I hate react so much. I hate it with the fiery rage of an old testament god. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it.

Unfortunately I picked up Angular (2). I'm now used to a framework that has you covered for most things. That has logical methods of laying out your app. A router that's actually built in and makes sense.

I'm used to writing HTML in the templates, not some horrible abomination of XML that's pretending to be HTML and just waiting to pull off its mask and smack you across the face with its penis while telling you what an idiot you are.

React apps all seem to be cobbled together in a different way. You have to go hunting for the logical stuff you expect to be there.

Let's not even get started on the tome of dependencies it needs to get itself off the ground, all written by vastly different developers from different planets with completely different life goals.

I hate it. The more I learn about it the more I find myself yelling "WTF!" while shaking a fist at the wall, hot tears of rage steaming down my pudgy cheeks until my wife comes running into the room and consoles me with my head on her bosom.

...and I just started a project that will have to be seen through to the end, using.. react.

Seriously, fuck you react, I hope you die of herpes.

We have to use a 20 year old API that is half assed and doesn't even work right every time.
Every three months the same discussion comes up why something doesn't work that relies on that API. I have to explain the situation over and over again... And then my boss starts to give 'solutions' which we already use or are utterly stupid... >.<

In case someone is wondering: SOAP API on a Windows Server 2003 with timeouts every few minutes and XML output in a language that is not English (even the tags!).

FUCKING HELL.

It's already enough that this FUCKING API I have to work with is a mess of JSON and XML responses mixed together.
With mixed german and english keys and attributes all sprinkled over it.
And API access locked to Austria only for some reason.

And then they even manage to fuck up the little bit of JSON they use.

It's just a fucking array of strings (where one could easily use integers).

They can stick this fucking steaming pile of shit that they call API up their PHP infested assholes.

I hate web development sometimes.

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

GraphQl because I work only with XML+SOAP

So Ive to make new screens in xaml in combination with C# (WPF)

So I had something like this in the codebehind
titleBox.Text = Properties.Resources.someKey

The resources looks like
<data name="someKey">
<value>some text</value> <!-- this is some comment --> <!-- and another one -->
</data>

The title got as value "and another one", when I removed it it became "this is some comment" removing that resulted in the value "some text"

Management directed a 2-month project including 5 developers, 3 DBAs, plus Q&A to replace a SOAP service that retrieved data from a single table. End result, project lasted 9+ months, 5 spectacular failed 3:00AM deployments, and a WCF service that retrieved data from a single table. Justification? Management wanted to eliminate SOAP, because SOAP uses XML and XML is slow. Thank goodness no one opened up Fiddler to see how WCF communicates.

I fucking told them that yes, i can do frontend but im in no way expert, so dont expect much.

"Yeah, cool, use angular"

I was full of questions and tried to reason with them that angular is literally just an unnecessary load and would slow the development down (its a really simple site).

"No, use angular"

Ok fine whatever. So i built the site, it was ugly as fuck, half the functionality was hacked in with jquery because i have no idea how these fucked up frameworks work (or apparently dont work) when i realized that i get jackshit from the backend.

Turns out most of the json responses were totally disregarding the json standard, like {1: tag0},{2: tag1}, where a json arrat should have been used. The other half was xml. Yeah. Also of course they used spring so the backend took like 3 months where it could have been done in like 2 weeks.

At work one morning, I was asked in chat for a way to edit an xml file on a Mac. They couldn't open it due to permissions. I told them to open Terminal and run sudo vi /path/to/file.xml. Never got a message back about it, so I assumed everything was OK. Later that afternoon, I received another question: "I'm in, I've made the changes, now what? How do I get out?" It wasn't funny until I realized how many memes existed for this. I'd imagined they'd quickly opened and edited it and spent hours unable to exit it; though, realistically, it probably wasn't attempted until the afternoon. Truthfully, I was new to it, too, and have no idea why I suggested vi over something else.

There are few things I hate worse than working with XML in C#

Last night I looked at an Android app.
Going to put it bluntly, I don't like java much.

But Android takes it to a whole new level.
I was talking to our (SlimRoms) framework dev about how the database transactions used to take 400ms, and it was cut down to 10ms by, changing to xml with some kind of a reflector (so xml would be saved in the background).
This is atrocious. As a web developer, I live in a world where you can do thousands of transactions in that time (albeit on faster hardware).

So how is it that all of the abstractions in Android add up to a single read/insertion in Android (and I'm talking about an app written by Google) takes 400ms?

Every time I go in that channel to talk to them, I find something screwed up. Gah.

SO MAD. Hands are shaking after dealing with this awful API for too long. I just sent this to a contact at JP Morgan Chase.

-------------------
Hello [X],
1. I'm having absolutely no luck logging in to this account to check the Order Abstraction service settings. I was able to log in once earlier this morning, but ever since I've received this frustratingly vague "We are currently unable to complete your request" error message (attached). I even switched IP's via a VPN, and was able to get as far as entering the below Identification Code until I got the same message. Has this account been blocked? Password incorrect? What's the issue?

2. I've been researching the Order Abstraction API for hours as well, attempting to defuddle this gem of an API call response:

error=1&message=Authentication+failure....processing+stopped

NOWHERE in the documentation (last updated 14 months ago) is there any reference to this^^ error or any sort of standardized error-handling description whatsoever - unless you count the detailed error codes outlined for the Hosted Payment responses, which this Order Abstraction service completely ignores. Finally, the HTTP response status code from the Abstraction API is "200 OK", signaling that everything is fine and dandy, which is incorrect. The error message indicates there should be a 400-level status code response, such as 401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden or at least 400 Bad Request.

Frankly, I am extremely frustrated and tired of working with poorly documented, poorly designed and poorly maintained developer services which fail to follow basic methodology standardized decades ago. Error messages should be clear and descriptive, including HTTP status codes and a parseable response - preferably JSON or XML.
-----

This whole piece of garbage is junk. If you're big enough to own a bank, you're big enough to provide useful error messages to the developers kind enough to attempt to work with you.

So I had been developing a real estate website and developing a MLS feed parser. I had only 1 year experience at that time and parsing a XML feed was already complex enough. On top of it, the client wanted to automate feed download from the MLS provider through HTTP authentication. Managed to do it. Everything worked for 15 days and on 16th day the property location markers stopped appearing on Google maps. Turned out that address to lat-long reverse geocoding was failing because API limit exhausted. My bad, I coded it on view instead of caching the lat-long in database. Fixed it in a day and viola!

Parsing xml of a docx file manually, because libraries like apache poi dont provide the functionality you need...

I've decided to take a look at flutter today and boy... I must say I hate writing layout for it.
Not cause of all those margin thing no.. It's just too verbose, awful.
I don't want to spend that much time writing the UI, I want to focus on the logic.
Even XML was better than that.

I think I'll wait for a layout editor before coming back to it.

But I have to admit that hot reload is really nice after spending so much time waiting for my builds on Android 😓

i hate ios storyboard
its a disaster
its not Version controllable, also its not as good as android xml layouts where you can just copy paste someone else xml to get a view exactly like his
right now I have to clone a git repo, to open it in xcode, just to see how the guy has set up one of his textFields so that I can create a textfield like his

XML isn't too bad, as long as it's fully standards compliant and uses an DTD.

In other words, about 2% of XML documents in the wild.

I used to think that using XML was history... How wrong can one be :/

For God's sake why can't you just keep consistency across your fucking files? I have to parse 3 different XML files from the same source where I have "ZipCode", "zipCode" and "Code" for the same thing.

Not to mention that the file that contains all the streets in the country have literally one street node for every motherfucking street. Not one city parent and multiple street children that would make sense and would be faster to parse, but clearly that wasn't your intention you retarded cunt.

Just found out that MQTT.fx stores user credentials in plain text in a xml file.
WTF?!
I mean it's only stored locally but it's still a bit worrying.

java it is a black box that convert XML to SQL

Being able to learn the basics of many languages so that I can do things the fastest way.
Because the Dutch national railway uses fucking XML for their api

I've been trying to query some data from an 18 GB xml DB through BaseX for about 9 hours without success.

Just wondered how LinQ would work with the same xml info. Just got the info I needed in less than 15 minutes.

God bless LinQ.

When I asked the client if they have an existing API with xml or json, they said that they will send me Excel xlsx per email.

Who the hell returns a SOAP response with a CDATA node containing a text string that is a concatenation of XML document?

Someone hates me...

I don't think I've been more excited about anything than my very first application.

This was when I was just starting out with programming. I had chosen C++ as my first programming language.

A friend and I'd written a simple application to fetch XML data from a sports data server, parse it and display our favourite football (soccer, for Americans) team's fixtures and results on a GUI.
We called it Sportify.

One time someone decided to make a "Condition Checking Framework" so you could check conditions at runtime using pre-configured XML files.

...yeah, someone made XML based if statements.

...they were very proud.

...

!rant
I need to learn xml. any resource suggestion ?

Android devs, what are your thoughts about the naming conventions google tries to enforce on us, especially with the xmls?

I opened a new project after months of leaving android dev, and thought of trying the basic activity template with name 'myActivity'

On clicking it, a ton of files got created : myActivity, myActivityFragment ,... And in xml the reverse naming notation : activity_my, fragment_my, content_my,...

This naming is uncomfortable .in a large project, activities usually acts as complete modules in which different tasks are handled : logins getting checked, data being cached, database being accessed and much more...
So if my activity 'abc' has a content fragment and a toolbar whose design is in another xml, shouldnt the 3 of them be named like:
abc_activity.xml
abc_activity_fragment.xml
abc_activity_toolbar.xml

And not
activity_abc.xml
fragment_abc.xml
toolbar_abc.xml

??
At the very least , it would look nice since the components that are displayed together will have their files together. And i don't know much about testing, but i believe it would be helpful there too

Sent xliff (xml) translation file to the client.
Got docx back...

Reading about how C# types from xml schema xsd's are converted.
Seeing a few integer conversions I don't expect.

We have to use a API from a customer that requires the XML we send to be sorted in a certain way.

sitting at work handjamming xml, turn around and tell my senior dev"it would be great if i could write a program to just search this folder and grab all the names for me..." he looks at me like like i have about 20 heads and am an idiot, after about 2 minutes of staring at me he remembers im fairly new and just tells me its super easy in C#... so i learned C# real quick. Anything to make my job easier right?

(On conference call with potential client)
Me: ...yes, you can interface with our system via our documented interfaces, using either JSON or XML...
Client: That's too hard. Can I just email you guys a Word doc or something?
Sales Rep: Yep, we can totally handle that, no problem.

I'm so PISSED OFF because of all the problem fixing I do. Most of the time, I take tutorials which have 6 steps a and 10 lines of code plus some config, and ALWAYS there is a problem somewhere, where it hasn't been covered in the guide. WHAT THE FLAMING FUCK? I literally spend days after days to figure out, that it's a problem with mostly one file/value, and no goddamn guide ever mentions the dependencies, if you don't have the defaults set for somewhat reason. And it's like this with every motherfucking tutorial I do to implement something, and most of the time I do understand what I'm doing, but THAT ONE VALUE/TRICK/FILE/SETTING/XML TAG/CODE TO A NUCLEAR SILO IS NEVER MENTIONED, WHY?!?!

I'm learning Android development in my spare time. As a web dev who tasted css, writing styles in xml makes me drill my eyes.

It's funny cause I started web development using pure XML on one of those easy website building sites back when Symbian was still a thing. Oh how proud I was when I did the marquee effect. Ofourse I was only 12 and by the time my dad bought a laptop in 2007 I was already teaching him how to use it.

But I suppose my real exposure to computers was when I wrote a batch file to play an explosion sound whenever someone at my local internet cafe would open up Internet Explorer instead of Firefox. I didn't even know how to program in batch.

I was pretty fucked up back then. Still am.
(¬º-°)¬

Just wanted to code some better public transportation route calculator (better ux) and found out that the pt company offers an API.

EVERY FUCKING REQUEST HAS TO BE SENT AGAINST THE SAME FUCKING ENDPOINT IN A POST REQUEST WITH THE ORIGINAL REQUEST AS FUCKING XML IN THE FUCKING BODY. At least they offer xsd files... BUT THATS NO FUCKING HELP. At least not that much of a help. AND THE DOCUMENTATION DOES NOT STATE A SINGLE FUCKING EXAMPLE OF HOW TO USE THAT FUCKING ENDPOINT. I FOUND THIS OUT BY SENDING RANDOM REQUESTS TO THE ENDPOINT TRYING TO REVERSE ENGINEER THE EXISTING FUCKING FRONTEND AND NOW I NOTICED THAT 80% OF THE FUCKING DOCUMENTED FEATURES ARE DISABLED BECAUSE: NOT FUCKING SUPPORTED!!!

MAAAN WHY DO YOU DO THIS.

Alternatively I'd use the GTFS files they provide but THEY ARE FUCKING INCOMPLETE AND DONT STICK TO THE EXISTING STANDARD GOOGLE DEFINED... They also offer a different propietary format... BUT THATS FUCKING UNDOCUMENTED AND FUCKING INCOMPLETE...

Here's something I'm sick of seeing: server software documentation that doesn't fully list what ports they are using. Too often I've read things like this: "AcmeServe uses ports 400, 8001, and 8002". Great, but why are you making me guess if those are TCP or UDP?

And sometimes it's: "AcmeServe uses ports 400 (UDP), 8001 (TCP), and 8002 (TCP)". Soooo, which ones do I port forward? Are you really going to make me have to use netstat -a to find out?

I can't understand the mentality behind that. They obviously realise you need to setup firewalls, but they half-arse it by only telling you the port numbers but not the protocol and/or if they're inbound/outbound.

Please, list what protocol the port is and if it's listening or outbound. Oh, and consider also mentioning where the port numbers come from in your config files, so I don't have to go playing a guessing game with a bunch of XML files should someone have overridden the default port numbers.

When you contact the API communication support of the supplier, and several emails and test cases later they still fail to understand your problem.

Took an Uber today, when the driver found out that I was a Dev he couldn't stop talking about this app he was paying a poor guy to make. In the middle of the conversation he said the guy was developing the app on XML, I suggested that the guy might be doing it with another language, but he insisted and was 100% sure it was XML. It didn't matter how much I explained it was not possible to develop the app on XML since it wasn't a programing language but the fucker wouldn't let go of this crazy shit. Anyways, very long trip, and a reminder to be humble and honest about what you know.

What is the "best" framework to develop mobile apps?
I tried android studio (native java etc)
And Fuse (XML/js framework for native iOS and android)
Since android studio isn't a fast development and Fuse doesn't had a big community with support, I thought about angular and native script. Any experience? Any advice?

Not sure if I am Allowed to ask general questions here but here's the thing. I just began making Android apps. I have made a few basic of them and I use constraint layout via the layout editor in Android Studio. Is it okay? Do professionals do the same or do they actually type in the xml code?