xml-dev - RE: Real stuff

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Tue, 21 Nov 2000, Didier PH Martin wrote:

> Didier replies:
> Matt, since the breakfast and your excellent presentation (at XML devcon
> 2000), AxKit made a blip on my radar. I went several times to your site to
> learn more about AxKit. Off course, I am already counting your server as a
> server able to serve XML documents. And I really appreciated your
> presentation about the open source servers. It greatly helped to sort out
> things. However, there is one thing I didn't understood yet: it is how AxKit
> can handle dynamically created XML content. I noticed that your site
> responds to an XML request like, for instance, with the following link:
> http://axkit.com/news/2000/10/02/01.xml. I understand well that any static
> XML document is cached (no needs to transform it every time off course) but
> I could not find what the server is doing for dynamically created XML
> documents.

Dynamically created XML documents are transformed on each hit. Luckily
Sablotron and XPathScript are pretty much fast enough to be able to do
this up to a reasonable hit rate. XPathScript should get a boost soon from
a lot of code being moved out of Perl and into C, so it will be an even
better situation (note that XPathScript has from the outset used the
"compiled stylesheet" approach, the thing that slows it down is XPath).

> Also, when you say "regularly updated" does this means that there
> is a daemon scheduled to transform the XML documents in batch (at preset
> time)? Or is it that when an XML document is called and the disk version is
> not newer than the cache version we get the cache, otherwise the document is
> transformed, stored in the cache and then provided to the client.

The latter.

> PS: There is nothing wrong to sell a product. Everybody has to make a decent
> living. So, no problem if AxKit is a product and no problem at all even if
> it where a closed source product. What's really count is the craftsmanship
> behind it and how well it help us do our job. Like an old Japanese sword
> master told me "when you pay a fair price for my swords you just reward all
> the love, attention, years of learning my craftsmanship and my ancestor
> heritage. You do not buy a sword, you buy a piece of my life. YOu do not buy
> a sword, you buy knowledge that took the shape of a sword".

I guess I'm on a few mailing lists where there are a lot of people selling
a solution and piping up with it as the answer to every problem. I call
that spam, and its something I loath to do.

PS: For an example site using AxKit see http://www.pdamd.com/

-- 
<Matt/>

    /||    ** Director and CTO **
   //||    **  AxKit.com Ltd   **  ** XML Application Serving **
  // ||    ** http://axkit.org **  ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP  **
 // \\| // **     Personal Web Site: http://sergeant.org/     **
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