X (not, nee Twitter) Marks the Nightmare

It should not be novel to hear from me that XML is the devil's spawn. It might be novel to read a lengthy (more or less)post mortem of a major IT scandal on-going in the UK. Not much in USofA news, but has been around since I subscribed to "The Guardian". In a nutshell: some years ago, The Royal Mail was partially privatized, and eventually the Post Office system was computerized. In the UK, there are some 14,000 post offices, some large proportion of which are just counters in some small business in some village run by that small business owner. When all this shifting happened, back in the late 1990's, it was decided to computerize said 'offices' with a centralized system. The datastore of record is Oracle.

The origins of what is called Horizon is convoluted, but began with a software contract with a (no longer extant) company called ICL, now part of Fujitsu; the latter very much in the dock, as the Brits say.

Here's where it gets interesting. Almost immediately, Horizon began dunning small business owners of Post Office locations with account shortfalls, i.e. theft from the Post Office. Many were convicted and sent to prison and some committed suicide. Yes, you read that last bit correctly.

The linked paper goes into much detail about the debacle, but the interesting (at a technical, not social, level) bit is that these chuckleheads who coded Horizon built it on Oracle and XML!!! This at the time when using XML was rudimentary; kind of like servlets in raw java before myriad frameworks.

Great idea!! Mix relational with hierarchical!!! What could possibly go wrong?

Basically, everything.

Because Legacy Horizon was developed before the use of XML became widespread, Attribute Grammars fulfilled this function [not yet implementations of XML Schema] in Legacy Horizon.

Yeah, just a bunch of un-verified character strings. What could possibly go wrong?

If you're still interested, much more reporting continues.