Like most developers working today, I spend about 99% of my life swimming in JSON. It’s just the default language of the modern web. Whether you're building Next.js apps, spinning up Node microservices, or fetching data for mobile apps, everything revolves around clean, readable JSON.
I honestly thought my days of wrestling with angle brackets were long gone. Left behind in the mid-2010s.
Then, a few weeks ago, a new client dropped this bomb in Slack:
"Hey, quick question—can we get this webhook payload sent over as XML instead?"
My first instinct was a slight internal sigh. But as I dug deeper into their infrastructure, it made sense. Turns out, a massive chunk of the enterprise world—especially payment gateways, government APIs, banking systems, and legacy logistics software—still completely relies on XML. It’s the invisible backbone of systems that were built to last decades, and they aren't changing anytime soon.
So, I was faced with a choice. I had a perfectly good, deeply nested JSON response, and I needed to map it into valid XML without breaking the data structure.
If it’s a tiny object with three fields? Sure, you can manually type out the tags or write a quick, hacky template string. But when you’re dealing with hundreds of lines of nested arrays, attributes, and data types? Doing it by hand is a recipe for a bad afternoon. One missed closing tag or an unescaped ampersand, and the whole parser breaks.
I spent way too much time looking for a quick, no-nonsense way to handle the conversion on the fly. Because we kept running into these weird edge-case formatting needs during API integration, we ended up just building a dedicated JSON to XML converter directly into Fixzi.ai.
Now, instead of overthinking it or writing a custom serialization script just for one client milestone, you just paste the JSON, grab the XML, and move on to actual coding. No missing closing tags, no schema headaches, just done.
It was a good reminder that as much as we love shiny new tech, the older, battle-tested standards still run a huge part of the world. Having the right utility in your back pocket makes all the difference when a legacy requirement comes out of nowhere.
Out of curiosity, when was the last time a project forced you to dust off your XML skills? Was it a banking API, a SOAP service, or something else entirely?
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