Would that achieve the exact same thing though? My goal was to be able to prewire certain relationships so that queries could be simplified and maybe even be sped up by removing the join. It won't work for all applications, but for some if could be very handy. It also gets more mileage out of straight XPath queries.
It would produce the same result, because you could use the same namespaced link attributes, but it would require the document to be processed manually instead of automagically, allowing the linking functionality to not be tied specifically to our DOM implementation. A single XQuery query could be used to perform the linking, and it could even be done using SAX or DOM (where right now, we can only do it using DOM).
What I ultimately really want is to have our DOM implementation function identically to any other DOM you could bootstrap using JAXP,
This sounds like a nice goal, but is it really necessary? What does it gain us and what do we lose? I'm just trying to understand the motivation.
For the client/server model, probably not much, but if you were to embed the server into another application (say Tomcat, for example), there may be conflicts as to which DOM is used. Either we can explicitly create our own DOM instances ignoring the DOMBuilder stuff, or we can work cleanly with JAXP, which has the benefit of not requiring inter-implementation conversion, which may slow things down if nodes are imported between DOMs.
and offload functionality like AutoLink into another layer, preferably into an XQuery engine, where the behavior is easily coded, instead of using Java to do it.
I think you need to explain more what you mean here. I'm not seeing the benefit of pushing it into the XQuery layer or even how it would work.
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Personally, I don't like XQuery, and would prefer it we XUpdate and XSelect were the standards, but I'm not the one who influences the XML world :-)
Ugh, while XQuery isn't great I'd much rather have that then a cumbersome XML syntax language. XUpdate is nice but, I always find it very, very cumbersome to use. I want better interactive query and update facilities and I just don't see XUpdate and XSelect getting us there. XQuery may not be the right way either, but it is a lot closer.
Closer? Like XQuery updates? :-) I'm not holding my breath.
-- Tom Bradford - http://www.tbradford.org Developer - Apache Xindice (Native XML Database) Creator - Project Labrador (XML Object Broker)
