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RE: XML aggregation question?

• From: "Andrew S. Townley" <ast@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
• To: 'XML Developers List' <xml-dev@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 17:12:41 +0100

Thanks, Mike.  That's 2 votes for an XML DB.  Guess it's time to figure
out how to use one.  What Mike describes is what I want to avoid if
possible.

Originally, I had envisioned the information to be more of the "nearly
read-only" variety, however, the more I think about it, some of the
instances may be updated on a daily or weekly basis and new ones would
be added quite regularly as well.  I'll have to read the article Peter
mentioned to see which camp this puts my instances in.

Based on Peter's suggestion, I had a quick look at eXist.  Looks like
their REST API is pretty much what I was looking for, or will at least
facilitate my tool/lanuage-agnostic approach to accessing my data.  I
wasn't really terribly excited about using a database, though because
while this isn't a 24x7 app I'm thinking about, I'm trying to break my
thinking from being tied to the "one central database" approach and all
it implies:  replication/clustering/fail-over.  I guess that particular
research project will have to wait.

Most of what I plan to poke the XML repository with isn't going to be
Java, although there's likely to be some in there from time to time.  It
will most likely be a mixed bag of clients accessing the repository over
HTTP, so at least I don't have to write the HTTP verb handler if I go
with the eXist approach.  I guess it'll make me finally break down and
learn XQuery in the process as well.

Does anyone know anything about using either the REST API or something
equivalent in a different XML DB?  Any gotchas that you're aware of or
things I should think about if I go this route?  Like I said, this was
one of the things I was looking at implementing anyway as the primary
mechanism to access the repository, however it would've been nice just
to edit the instances directly from the filesystem with your favorite
text editor.

Thanks for the help so far,

ast

P.S.  As a side note, it took less than 20 minutes to get my first SPAM
on this account from sistani.org after using it to post my question. 
Ah, progress and modern technology... *sigh*

On Sat, 2006-08-26 at 15:01, Michael Kay wrote:
> I think if you don't start of by using a database, there's a good chance
> that you will end up in effect writing your own. I'd go for an XML DB.
> 
> Michael Kay
> http://www.saxonica.com/
-- 
Andrew S. Townley <ast@a...>
http://atownley.org

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: XML aggregation question?
    • From: James Fuller

• References:
  • RE: XML aggregation question?
    • From: Michael Kay