April 10, 2003
XPath Queries over Objects
A very interesting article on MSDN about querying objects via XPath. This is fascinating stuff and really brings home how vastly superior .Net is for XML when compared to what's available in the Cocoa frameworks. In fact Apple's XML support is so pathetic I'm embarrassed to even talk about it.
Come on Apple, XML is the most important technology around and the Cocoa frameworks have virtually no support for anything of value in the XML arena. The pathetic Core Foundation XML parser is a joke. It's a C API, doesn't directly support namespaces, has no DOM, no SAX hell no anything that anyone's ever seen before. Forget about getting XPath or XSL-T working with it. Garbage, garbage, garbage.
Sure we can drop out to Java, or C or C++ or even Perl and Python, but why is this necessary? Objective C is a perfect language for building awesome XML tools and solid XML support is critical for building network enabled applications. So far Apple's really dropped the ball in this arena. I'd say third parties should build better tools, but XML is truly foundation now and solid support absolutely must be baked into the basic platform. Apple's has some interesting stuff, i.e. the XQuery implementation that's part of Sherlock, it's just locked up in places that are useless to other app developers. It could be so good, but instead it's so sad. I'm getting .Net envy and I'm not happy about that.