Why aren't the configuration files in XML ?

[Beta User]

I'm confused. Why aren't the configuration files in XML ?

It makes manually editing them a nightmare as you can't use an IDE to schema check or prompt for attributes, and can only verify configurations by attempting to start the server.

[robh]

Paul,

We had two choices for using XML config. You can use a generic XML file (like the Spring <beans> file) or you can have specific tags for every subsystem. The issue with generic XML in our setting is that it would quickly become verbose and unwieldy. The issue with custom XML for every subsystem is that it is a *lot* of work to handle that nicely and get a good quality schema. In the end we decided a generic format was better and JSON is nice and compact when you want a generic mechanism.

We hope to provide editor support in the Platform tooling in a future release.

Rob

[Sam Brannen]

Hi Paul,

The Platform's configuration files use the JSON format. Please search the forums for discussions on "JSON" for further details regarding the format choice:

http://www.springsource.com/beta/applicationplatform/search.php?PostBackAction=Search&Advanced=1&Type=Comments&Keywords=json&Categories=&AuthUsername=

Regards,

Sam

[Beta User]

Ok ta for the explanation. It just looks a bit weird at first !

I'll look forward to some tooling for editing the config,by which time I won't need it, as I'll know how to do it all by hand ;-)