[ejames]

I've seen the value of text formats personally.

I work mainly on an iPhone project. In order to handle customers requests for this or that custom UI feature, I invented a tool that generates something like a simplified XIB file from an image and a chunk of CSV. I made the end result of the tool a text file that the iPhone code parses.

Working in text saved a lot of time. Since I invented my own tool, naturally there were things to debug and tweak in the results, but I could do that with a text editor and commit the changes as easily diff-able deltas in git. Although I work on iPhone code, everything also has to be implemented in Android - but it's no problem for the Android developer to use the text file since it's just text.

I've also written tools for migrating chunks of customer data from an old back-end system to a new one using the new server's customer-facing API. This was partly for dogfooding purposes, since the API was new and had very suspect stability.

I wrote the tools to generate text files where each line is a JSON payload that would be sent to the server. It made everything easier to debug - examining the payloads lets you distinguish between errors in the export tool and errors in the API. The text files themselves could then become test cases if there was a bug in the API, or be quickly hacked to contain correct payloads via find-and-replace if the export tool was wrong but we still needed the migration to finish right away.

[tedmiston]

I'm building a tool very similar to what you describe for Android right now. It involves a simplified XML description of the GUI which is sent over a network to an Android device, then "inflated" to actual GUI code.

Could you elaborate about your system a bit?