Re: [xml-dev] XML aggregation question?

[James Fuller <jim.fuller@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andrew S. Townley wrote:
> 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.

You dont have to use XQUERY if u dont want to in eXist, though you may 
find it useful...so far my apps in eXist follow a 1% XQUERY / 5-15% XSLT 
/ the rest some XML markup

though I tend to use XML-RPC via perl for programmatic (via XML:DB api) 
for everything else, the REST interface makes debugging easy.

> 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.

exist provides a webdav interface that allows this.

gl, Jim Fuller

> 
> 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/