Reinhard Poetz wrote: ...
I think it is overkill for many non beginners as well ;)It would be very cool if we could provide something that helps with flow applications. I like the combination of OR-Mapping/CForms/Flow but this is for many beginners overkill. They shouldn't be forced to write Java code e.g. in order to implement a simple register form.
-- Reinhard
I am currently looking at XML-DBMS 2.0, http://www.rpbourret.com/xmldbms/index.htm, which is an XML/relational mapping tool. The main idea is that you describe the mapping between XML and the relational db in a mapping file, then you can use the mapping tool to both store the XML document in the db and retrive XML from the db. The detailed storing strategy - using overwrite or update etc can be fine tuned in another configuration file. And the retrieving behaviour can fine tuned with a filter file.
XML-DBMS is intended for data centric rather than document centric applications and provide a rather flexible mapping between one XML document and a number of tables. It also contains a tool for generating maping files from DTD:s and, IIUC, from db meta data. It can also generate create table statements from the maping file.
I think XML_DBMS look rather promissing, and I have not found any other packages that dom direct XML relational mapping, all other seem to require Java objects in the middle. Anyone that know about any simmilar packages?
Possible drawbacks are that the community is very small, and that the packaging is not that good: no ant script. The documentation is good however, Ronald Bourret, the main author have written a number of articles about XML mappings.
The licence is: "XML-DBMS, along with its source code, is freely available for use in both commercial and non-commercial settings. It is not copyrighted and has *absolutely no warranty*. Use it as you will."
Given that XML-DBMS holds what it promise, I will try to build an block around it. My idea is to use XML-DBMS from flowscripts, so the best way to integrate it would probably be to write some component, like pipelineUtil around XML-DBMS. An SQLToXMLTransformer XMLToSQLTransformer pair would also be a possibility.
Others interested in such a block? Opinions?
/Daniel
