pomaid - a tool for creating pom.xml

One of the many things I dislike about Maven is its use of XML as a language format. This was au courant back when Maven was released, but by now, many people realize that this is a poor use for XML.

It's not hard to figure out why. A pom.xml file (the script that drives Maven) consists of XML syntax and the data that is specific to your project. The data specific to your project is not only information but is the most important information to someone on your project looking at the pom.

Most programmers would probably agree with this, but then they all forget information visualization 101: Keep important information front and center. Most people think of data visualizations when they hear information visualization, but I would argue that any information you produce should be easy for people to understand, and the theory behind visualizations is still relevant.

I grabbed a random pom off the Internet, and broke it apart into the Maven syntax and the data you actually care about. Syntax is the start and end tags of XML. Data is the values relevant to your project. Here's the breakdown.

More than 75 percent of this pom.xml file was the syntax for Maven. Less than one-quarter of the text in the file was the data pertinent to the project.

I recently read an interesting article about "Invisible XML," which argued for the creation of DSLs that present information clearly and concisely but transform into whatever XML your system might need.

I thus decided to make a tool that would provide a minimalist syntax that could be used to generate pom.xml files needed by Maven. (And, inspired by the "Little Languages" chapter in The AWK Programming Language, I decided to do it in that language.) The result is pomaid.

Since dependencies are the meat of most pom files, I focused on that. Here's an excerpt from the pom I linked to earlier:


And here's the equivalent in pomaid:

And here's the syntax vs. data breakdown of the entire pom file I mention above, redone as a pomaid script.

In other words, the pomaid file pushes syntax into the background to produce something vastly more information-rich than its pom.xml equivalent.

While this may or may not be useful, I think it illustrates the point well enough: If you have to deal with XML, you may be better off writing a language that can provide clarity to the reader and then translate into the syntax-heavy, data-light XML.