Kimbro Staken wrote: > > On Tuesday, January 22, 2002, at 01:51 PM, Murray Altheim wrote: > > > This message describes the XNode, an API for use with Xindice that I've > > sent on to Tom and Kimbro for review. This is considered a proposal, a > > donation to the Apache project's Xindice code base. I'm interested in > > hearing feedback, and if it's generally positive, the API would be > > donated as part of Xindice. Sun will be releasing a UDDI registry project > > soon that includes an implementation of this API. If accepted as part of > > Xindice it'll be under an Apache license, if not, Sun will probably > > maintain copyright of it. Since I'm leaving the company next week to > > return to school I'm hoping the Xindice community accepts this donation, > > as I'd like to see it become a part of Xindice (I'm the author). > > > > I'm hoping to post online the entire javadoc of the API sometime > > soon. I'd send it to the list (a 32K zip), but I know how people > > feel about attachments on listservers, and I'm not sure it'd get > > through anyway. So below is a brief description in lieu of the more > > extensive documentation.
> I posted your docs online http://www.xmldatabases.org/projects/xndoc/. Thanks very much Kimbro. > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > Description > > > > Since Xindice has no general method for associating metadata with each > > "record" in the database, XNode was developed for this purpose. XNode > > is a very simple API, only five files (including an Exception class). > > This is really an issue that we should resolve properly, i.e. by directly > exposing this type of meta-data, rather then by just wrapping the content. > I'm not sure how extensible we'll want that mechanism to be though. So it > would be cool to have this available for people who want to have fully > extensible meta-data. The real question is whether this is part of the > core server or not. To me it doesn't seem like it should be, but then I > also understand that may be the only way this can be released. If I'm understanding this correctly, there's two ways that this could be accomplished, probably more. First, one could use nested collections, with an XNode-augmented Node containing further nested XNode-augmented Nodes. Or, more significant metadata mapping could be accomplished using XTM topic map technology (which is also how I'll be doing this on my own projects). > Is there more to this that I'm not seeing? If this was included, is it > something other people would find valuable? Would you be able to continue > maintaining it? Either myself or Jeff Suttor (who is project lead) would maintain it. If it ever became an issue I would commit to maintaining it insofar as I am able. There will be (as I mentioned) a Sun release of an implementation of this API as part of our UDDI registry project (part of the Web Services Pack). To answer your question, there's not more than what you see. It's not a complicated API, but I don't see that much more is needed. Much of the work is done by XNodeStore and XNodeFactory, particularly in the latter, the methods createXNode(), getXNodeAsDOM(), recreateXNode() and serializeXNode(). These do a fair amount of work. > > An XNode is an object acting as a container for XML content by providing > > an envelope element and some basic metadata attributes such as a node ID > > (nid), a timestamp, etc. If you're familiar with SOAP, it'll seem similar. [...] Murray ........................................................................... Murray Altheim <mailto:murray.altheim@sun.com> XML Technology Center, Java and XML Software Sun Microsystems, Inc., MS MPK17-102, 1601 Willow Rd., Menlo Park, CA 94025 Corporations do not have human rights, despite the altogether too-human opinions of the US Supreme Court.
