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Comment by lloydatkinson | Hacker News Reader

Do you think there's any of these still in use?

Absolutely. Putting an intelligent intermediary in front of an API is an age-old pattern, and moving that logic into the backing system itself may have its own logistical challenges.

Working on a product in an adjacent space, we translated WS-Security-protected SOAP interactions to OAuth JSON request/responses. The responses had omitted information based on the authorizations given in the OAuth access token scope.

In some cases you would have to replace the XML gateway with an alternative system, for instance when it is combining information from multiple sources which aren't allowed access to one another (say, for PII separation/auditing reasons).

I was asking specifically about if this "XML hardware" was still in use

And he specifically gave examples of where it is used... Search for IBM Datapowers and the like

Probably. I bet maintaining it is someone's personal hell.

Hell is others’ XML.

I will take XML over YAML any day.

It's not. It's much more simple, than anything else I know. XPath, and its higher-up XQuery make it a breeze! XSD, while not perfect, can be easily displayed as a graphical diagram. What you, however, need, and there is no way around it, is a specialized XML IDE or an IDE, that has "understood" XML.

I think you can still buy them. DataPower is still operating at IBM, but they put less emphasis on XML as a selling point and more on it as a general WAF.

I actually came across this wiki page when searching for the backstory behind JSONx, IBM's standard for representing JSON as XML.[^1]

[1]: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/7.6?topic=json...

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