Is XML dead already or what? Was: RE: What is XML for?

[Ed Howland]

Look, being a relative newcomer to the group and XML in general I did
appreciate this thread because it provided some insight into my current
problem. Having hyped XML to management, I must now deliver a solution. Our
first experiments were very positive. As far as proof of concept goes, its
been proven.

But what worries me is the long term performance objectives of our product.
Since it is e-commerce, I think traffic will just increase rapidly over
time. I still haven't figured out the best way to store our data in XML and
do high-performance lookups on it. I don't even know if I should have one
massive file or split it into logical groups of files and directories. Or
store it in text BLOBs in an RDBMS or use some kind of OODBMS based scheme.
There is even some talk here of XML-like structured repositories.

I don't have the time or resources to investigate each particular strategy
to find the closest fit to our problem. So by June I have to come up with a
XML-based approach that fits our performance models by year's end. It seems
I might have been a little naive. Perhaps storing the data in XML (or some
part of it anyway) isn't the right way to go. Is XML best suited (for now)
as only an interchange format? That would be too bad because all the
strengths of XML match our data model to a tee.

I am aware of others who have implemented XML based e-commerce solutions. I
only know of one actual methodology that seems to work for one of them. They
store the data in XML but use an RDBMS to index it to some level. Then they
parse the final file (or files) and merge them into a resultant XML stream.
This is then formatted with CSS (XSL presumably not yet ready for
prime-time) for presentation. Until I can find a better solution, this is
the short term fix I'm going for.

Ed
ed at dega.com 

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