I've posted the API documentation for XNode to:
http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/ceryle/docs/api/org/apache/xnode/package-summary.html
Thanks Murray, finally I had some time to sat down and give a look to your proposal. Sorry for my delay, but it's being a crazy time here. Some quick questions to start:
1. I couldn't find any SAX support in the API. Is that on purpose?
2. AFAIU metadata, in your proposal, are a fixed set (xnode:created and xnode:modified) plus an extensible and free set of properties based on key/value pairs. Can this be expressive enough? I mean, originally I had in mind:
- a set of fixed metadata a bit more extended than yours (basically mimicking the Unix "stat.h" structure). These are valid potentially for any XML:DB database, they share a common vucabulary and can be expressed as XML attributes;
- a set of application-specific metadata (implemented by any vendor of XML database). This is more a matter regarding the XAPI effort;
- an extension mechanism based on RDF triplets or some technology of this kind. I'm afraid that plain key/value pairs aren't expressive enough to gather all the possible needs.
3. I'm a bit puzzled about the idea of wrapping documents into XNodes. Not that I dislike the idea, but this looks to me like an alternative way of accessing an XML database, a sort of competitor to the XML:DB API. It might be the right thing to do but, if we are going this way, I'd rather explore the alternative of having XNodes as the basic building block for any XML database, wrapping up any possible element of the DB. This means that collections too should be XNodes (and, in fact, they need metadata too, don't they?). This goes in the direction that Stefano and others proposed some time ago, where an XML database could be seen as a huge DOM, where collections are special elements containg sets of XML documents. Might be worth exploring.
Thoughts?
Ciao,
-- Gianugo Rabellino
