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Re: [xml-dev] XPath and a continuous, uniform information space

Dimitre,

when you write the following:

"then we have achieved "world domination" -- our "infospace" covers any data.
While this seems like grandiose architecture, I personally find it too-general to be particularly useful."

then you must have a picture before your mind's eye which is quite different from mine. Mine is so practical that the usefulness is obvious. Let me try to explain.

Imagine a bunch of directories cluttered with Java properties files - perhaps the distributed configuration of an Enterprise Service Bus. You are interested in the question which files set a particular property "script" to which values.

Let us assume there is a standard function "fn:propertiesDoc" parsing a Java properties file into a node tree. If you have a list of all URIs (as one can create with a three-line XQuery script, using the file:list function of BaseX) - then a nice report is deliverd by this expression:
  
string-join(   doc('catalog.xml')//uri/fn:propertiesDoc(.)/*/script/concat(root(.)/document-uri(.), ' : script=', .) , "
")

Now the interesting question is how one would solve the problem without XML technology, for example with Java. If the alternatives are less elegant, more time-consuming and more error-prone, the usefulness of parsing non-XML into node trees has been illustrated.

No grandiose architecture, no world dominion. Only efficiency and elegance when dealing with distributed information - enabled by the info space in its broadened version, which includes Java property files (fn:propertiesDoc). 

Kind regards,
Hans






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