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Re: How far current XSLT processors will be useful in real applications?

• From: "Simon Wilson" <Simon.Wilson@c...>
• To: xml-dev@x...
• Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 14:09:20 +0200

>There is yet another category -- the ability to execute queries over XML and
>non-text data such as geocoded (geospatial) data, time series, images, and
>so on. To do that, a query processor needs to use a variety of index types
>(B-tree, quadtree, R-tree, etc)

You could take this further and say that, due to the fact that next to nobody
processes XML directly, but rather uses standardised API's/models (DOM/SAX) for
processing the XML content, it should be possible to 'virtualize' XML and access
ANY hierarchical data via the DOM API. An OODB engine might, for example,
provide a DOM interface for accessing its object as if they were XML structures.
This would be preferable to extracting an XML representation from the DBMS
(expensive), feeding it to SAX/DOM, and then doing your processing.

You could then transform the XML (that you don't actually physically have) using
XSLT directly on the DOM, which would be extremely cool. In the end you would
have a vendor independant API for the extraction and querying of hierarchical
data. Kind of a web-standardized ODBC for hierarchical stuff with everything
looking like XML/DOM, and seeing that hierarchies can be used to model both
relational data and objects, you would have a pretty powerful general purpose
data access interface.

This idea seems so good that someone must be implementing it already...

Out with ODBC/OLEDB and in with "VXML/DOM" or whatever you might want to call
it!

Simon Wilson
Software Engineer
Crealogix AG



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