Here's my initial comments on the proposed API.
EncodedBuffer should probably be renamed to something more useful, maybe CompressedDocument.
EncodedBuffer should probably be a subclass of Hashtable and just maintain the instance data as members of the Hashtable. This will allow the RPC library to serialize it directly. I'm thinking the sym and buf should be base64 encoded strings. And the class should just provide methods to convert byte[] to and from that form. I don't think it should contain byte[
] instance variables. Also it should have methods to take a Document instance and initialize itself from that and also to retrieve a document instance.
Also in the implementation sym and buf should really be given better names. Maybe symbolTable, documentContent and stamp should just be timeStamp. I' ve always found the current names ugly and confusing.
I don't understand the need for CollectionHandle? I'd just prefer to see a string used unless there's a really good reason otherwise.
I don't think we need DatabaseService, everything should just go through CollectionService. Not sure about KernelService yet.
NamedVal is another thing that if kept will need to be a Hashtable. I'm not sure we really need it though. It's probably just as easy to have an array of hashtables directly. Also if it's kept it should probably be renamed to something like Namespace.
When added to the tree, most of these classes shouldn't be part of the client package. They're really server side only. EncodedBuffer and NamedVal are the only exceptions that will be used on both the client and server. I know the CORBA servants are in that package, but I never understood why the servant classes were moved into the client package either.
There's several things we'll need to change in the CollectionService interface, basically added functionality that is missing from the current API. This would be things like meta-data about documents, collections, indexes and so on. Once we get the general shape of the API worked out we can dig into this in more detail.
Kimbro Staken - http://www.kstaken.org - http://www.xmldatabases.org Apache Xindice native XML database http://xml.apache.org/xindice XML:DB Initiative http://www.xmldb.org Senior Technologist (Your company name here)
