Re: [xml-dev] MarkMail: now archiving xml-dev

[Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>]

Jason Hunter wrote:

> I think the reason you *don't* see that is the inherent risk of letting 
> someone else run arbitrary code on your server.  What if the user starts 
> calculating Pi to 1,000,000,000 digits?  

Perhaps we shouldn't have made XQuery Turing complete? (Side note: I'm 
pretty sure XQuery is Turing complete. Has anyone proved it yet?)

> What if they start consuming 
> disk or thrashing the disk IO?  When you query against hundreds of gigs 
> of content, you don't have to be malicious to mess things up.
> 

Check out Ning some time. I have. Very cool stuff. Their backend is 
actually Oracle and Lucene, though from our perspective it seems like a 
native XML database would be a much better fit. However the ability to 
let people run code on their servers is a pretty important part of their 
value add.

Or for a less constrained appraoch, try Amazon EC2. Run any code you 
like on their servers.

Yes, it's challenging; but I suspect there's a real business model in 
there somewhere. :-)

-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/