Liquid XML 2014 Beta

For the last couple months I have been using a beta version of Liquid XML, for a number of reasons. I have a laptop, and I find Liquid a little easier to use on a smaller screen than XML Spy or Oxygen, and I have found the support for XML Schemas 1.1 very useful. This is new to 2014, but has been available in XML Spy and Oxygen for a while.

Hopefully XSD 1.1 becomes mainstream. It's just such a complete improvement over XSD 1.0.

With Liquid XML, I can also flatten composite schemas. I have been doing this using CAM Processor, and it's not something I need to do very often; and more often than not, I just roll my own transform for this. Still, it's useful. In the coming year, we are going to see a continuing shift from XML to JSON technologies on both the client and server, but I think this is misleading. At the same time, server-side XML is reaching a renaissance, because server-side validation and transformation are a critical part of client-side delivery of conformant JSON. It's as simple as that.

XPath is the power behind XQuery, XSLT, OASIS CAM and ISO Schematron. Now, it's an important part of XML Schemas; and XPath is developing very quickly, considering most people who are using XPath are still using version 1.0, and yet there are very mature features coming in version 3.0 - so it's still a good time to be working with XML; and it's a great time to be working with JSON as well.