New 'Orderly' schema threatens XML dominance?

Back in September, Jack Vaughan went out on a limb (or is that branch?) and predicted the eventual fading of XML, long the lingua franca of the Web services age. (See "XML on the wane? Say it isn't so, Jack.") Jack said that with the growing popularity of Rich Internet Applications an enterprise mashups, it’s conceivable that we may see less and less XML.

Now, Ganesh Prasad has identified what he describes as a new nail in the proverbial XML coffin. Up until now, he writes, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) offered a viable alternative to XML, but lacked rigor around data definition. JSON Schema was then developed to address this rigor gap, but tended to be "long-winded" with a "cumbersome syntax."

Now, Ganesh says, this long-windedness has been rectified with the launch of Orderly, a new schema language developed by Lloyd Hilaiel "that is far more compact than JSON Schema and yet round-trips to JSON Schema quite effectively."

So what?

Orderly may make life more, well, orderly for SOA practitioners, Ganesh advocates. With Orderly, "SOA architects can recommend the use of the simpler JSON data format instead of XML without having to worry about the lack of rigour in data definition," he says. "Data architects, designers and developers can use Orderly to design schemas without bothering about JSON Schema's cumbersome syntax. JSON parsers can work with the equivalent JSON Schema to validate a piece of JSON data without the need to understand two different syntaxes."

Has XML already become a (gulp) legacy mark-up language? It's still the foundation of many integration efforts, Web services, and SOA projects, so it's not going away anytime soon. But will Lloyd Hilaiel's new creation give architects and developers a sleeker alternative to work with?