I picked Cocoon as my platform in part because of the elegance and simplicity of keeping content in xml files in a directory(s) where I can see them, and so I can have ad hoc document structures without having to be tied down to a RDBMS schema that can never match all the content types I'll be publishing. So I think for simplicity's sake here assume I have a directory with a thousand xml files of textual content, say, news articles.
So any given portal object needs at some point to be able to query my repository for a few titles that meet a few criteria. That's easy in SQL of course -- but how do I do something like that in the XML/Cocoon world?
Do I index? Do I scour through once and then cache for a few hours? Do I have a separate procedural/Java process that creates intermediate files that can be more rapidly transformed into headline lists? I can imagine different general approaches, but I don't know how to implement with the Cocoon toolset, and I'm sure I'm not the first person to have this requirement.
A hand-written solution using DirectoryGenerator might be to slow if there are really thousands of files. Though you can cache its output, every non-cached access would probably take many seconds.
More appropriate seems to be the indexing using Lucene, but I don't how flexible it is with regard to your needs (latest 3, first sentence, etc.). And the more stuff you have to store the more I would tend to an XML database like XIndice.
All components are delivered with a recent Cocoon.
Joerg
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