On Monday, February 18, 2002, at 07:16 AM, Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
Kimbro Staken wrote:On Monday, February 18, 2002, at 06:05 AM, Dawid Weiss wrote:
KS> What if it was something that was stupid simple like automatically KS> creating two collections, one for documents and one for metadata?
OK, this is the cleanest hack I can think of, but still it's a hack. :)
Never claimed otherwise, "It's kind of hacky". :-)
It seems to me that we are playing different levels, let's try to make some points clear: you're talking about practical solutions to achieve the result of having metadata, I'm stuck to a generic metadata support, i.
e. if should metadata be offered to Joe User. This is *vital*, and we all agree on this, at least for basic "stat-like" metadata. Now:
You're right, this is a completely different issue. The problem with the XML:DB API is that it's going to be colored by what other databases support. I don't know exactly what they support though, so I have to do research in order to figure it out. From what I remember most don't have very rich support, if any at all.
* Supporting this means IMHO extending the XML:DB APIs somehow (I'm not in favor of proprietary extensions and the like).
You're probably right, I just don't want to tackle that yet. The XML:DB API is probably going to change quite a bit before too much longer. I want to focus on Xindice right now. Let's figure out what we want to support and how we want to expose it through our network API. Then we can look at seeing how the XML:DB API shapes up. I'd also prefer to have a little more real world experience with this before tackling the real API changes. My opinion is that we just add a proprietary service until then
In addition, I'm kind of driving both projects, among others, and right now I want to make sure we get Xindice moving nicely first. We've been kind of stalled as far as development goes. Once we're rolling along nicely, then I'll focus a little more on the XML:DB API project which is also kind of stalled. I also need to factor in SixDML which is becoming an XML:DB project too.
The major problem with XML:DB is that the XML database industry overall is really struggling. We need to get SiXDML going as there is a lot more vendor interest in that then the raw API. The good thing is it builds on the raw API so it will drive that too. It's just going to take some time and I don't want it to affect this project too much. It's more important that we get solid support in Xindice first. After all if the XML database industry doesn't pick up soon, Xindice may be the only one left and then we won't have to worry about anything else. :-(
* If we are to undertake an effort to change the XML:DB APIs IMHO it's worth to have some investigation and understand what kind of metadata we are to offer. I'm all for having a set of "system level" metadata plus a hook for user ones, but I might be stuck by FS at its best, so please don'
t hesitate to try my asbestos underwear on this issue. :)
* Given this, it doesn't really matter, at this point of the discussion, whether metadata should be stored inside the DOM, in a parallel document,
in a parallel Collection or in my closet: this is just an implementation detail.
I hope I made myself clear now :) Yet the more I think about it the more I'm convinced that this discussion really belongs to xapi-dev...
Yes it does.
Ciao,
-- Gianugo Rabellino
Kimbro Staken XML Database Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/
