XMLs Make for Really Annoying DSLs

I’ve been reading about jBPM as it relates to coding up job support in an application I’m working on and I am again struck that another project has chosen to use a DSL expressed as XML. After listening to a very interesting talk by Scott Davis on DSLs in Groovy and the clean expressivity of a simple DSL written in a dynamic language, I am not looking forward to kludging through jBPM’s XML spec. Had I the time to write a simple DSL translator into the world XML-ugly, I would.

If you are a developer considering how to make available your system to other developers, please, please, oh please, STOP using XML as a DSL!! It is painful to deal with. I wish I could express the hours lost staring at a wall of Spring or Ant XML DSL noise trying to see through the tags and atributes to the values of importance.