We’re working with legacy data feeds and apps that consume them. We want to introduce Xml but the additional performance overhead is hard to justify. How have you addressed this issue?
We’re working with a number of pre-existing data feeds, often files in a well known directory which are updated every few minutes. One approach to making this legacy data standards compliant is to convert it to Xml and publish the XSD – making it available to all. However this means we’re going to serialise/deserialise everything before we can use it, whereas currently apps just read the data.
We going from
File -> App
To
File -> Serialize to XML -> ESB/Network -> Deserialize -> App
The latter is clearly more structured and re-usable, a ‘better’ architecture. But the performance hit we’re going to take is high.
Convert to XML only where you must; don’t convert for the sake of “standards compliance” or “better architecture”. Surely you’d rather be adding more features or otherwise improving your product, right? This is a good moment to reflect on the YAGNI principle.