Will XML eat the web?

[Matthew Sergeant (EML)]

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Paul Prescod [SMTP:paul at prescod.net]
> 
> "Matthew Sergeant (EML)" wrote:
> > 
> > You
> > can use a persistent parsed structure like a DOM maintained in memory,
> but
> > for some applications such as a rapidly changing XML database this isn't
> > always feasible (or is it?). 
> 
> You could continually update the DOMs based on changes in the XML. What
> exactly are your concerns about this architecture.
> 
	Not everyone (ourselves included) uses DOM. We started that way but
found it too resource intensive (large amounts of both processing and
memory). We switched to a simple expat parser and built our own query
language based on XQL paths. This gave a huge speed up and drop in resource
usages, but I still have concerns.

> > Currently our web based XML system processes
> > about 5 files per second (very subjective figures) - and it's at max CPU
> > (it's only a Pii266). This is using expat. Not a good situation since I
> > could probably build a much faster application using an RDBMS - but I'm
> > looking to the future when I can send the raw XML to the client.
> 
> You need to store data that is efficiently maintained relationally. You
> need to *transmit* XML. Why not use a relational database and create XML
> when you need it.
> 
	That's not always the best (or possible) solution either. For
example we may ultimately allow people to edit the XML directly on the
server. Also, what gain would we then get from transmitting XML?

	Matt.

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