At 23:43 1/13/2003 +1100, you wrote:
I must confess I am not well versed in Java, but is there much performance
difference between having Xalan (or whatever) pass you back an array of
result nodes, compared to extract the returned nodes from the document root?
Is saving a couple of lines of code worth breaking a lot of peoples
applications?
The problem is that on my end there is a performance hit. This is because I have to load the XML document, extract the individual nodes and then generate string buffers of those individual nodes. This is because the XPath that is returned is not specification compliant....
I don't want to delve into language-specific issues, but I have a couple of considerations on this topic.
1. XML-RPC access in Xindice was, and still, is meant as a network transport for the networked XML:DB Java API: the fact of having a generic XML-RPC access to Xindice is just a (pleasant?) consequence. This means that it might well be possible that in the future the scenario will change: as we switched from CORBA to XML-RPC, we might switch to RMI, SOAP or WebDAV, without any backward compatibility issue to consider (meaning that we will be backward compatible to XML:DB clients, not to XML-RPC calls that the client makes). While I don't see the XML-RPC stuff going away anytime soon, please note that there is no contract whatsoever that the way XML-RPC access is implemented will not change in the future: our only contract with users is to have a consistent client-server scenario with the XML:DB APIs.
2. Since XML-RPC direct access is somehow outside of the Xindice scope and not directly supported as it stands now, my suggestion is to feel free to add to your particular setup any XML-RPC method you might see as more consistent with your particular environment. We are currently discussing on (and if) give hooks to users to extend the XML-RPC layer in a structured way, but as of now it's more than enough to place your class in the o.a.x.server.rpc.messages package to add your own XML-RPC accessor.
<disclaimer>
These are not official statements from the Xindice developers group, rather they are only my opinions derived from common sense and experience. The future scenario, anyhow, might change significantly, and I'm not at all against someone stepping up to maintain the XML-RPC access *if* and *when* it will be discontinued.
</disclaimer>
This said, I'm still not getting what you mean when you talk about XPath result not being specification compliant. AFAIK there is no cross-platform and standard way of returning an XPath result, so the actual decision is left to the implementor. But I'd be more than willing to know more about this: can you point me out to some documentation on this topic?
Ciao,
-- Gianugo Rabellino
