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  • From: John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>
  • To: Permaculture Plant Database <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] status
  • Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2005 12:22:52 +0000

Aloha,

Thanks for the questions and input...I'll leave some replies to the rest of the gang...

XML is fine for capturing complex data sets, but isn't
always the answer. With a properly defined data
model, and non text data, XML would be over kill.

I am also no fan of XML's overhead.
However it is familiar and popular and would do the job.

I wonder if the consumers of the data you will serve
have been defined.

We are designing to have a clean API for the data engine that will support a wide variety of clients, from vanilla HTML (and even text/cli if desired) to graph-based UIs and all sorts of other possibilities.
At this point XML is (I think... :-) our initial data transport mechanism of choice.

If you plan on thin client apps
(Java/browser) being your only consumers, XML is fine.
However, a more involved site might want to reduce
network traffic with a more traditional record based
feed (perhaps even compressed and over ssh
channels(scp)).

One way to deal with bandwidth issues is to have part of a 'fat' client actually run on the server, and use some more-efficient-than-XML transport mechanism to pass information back and forth to the remote part of the client.

For example to take the XML overhead out for really low-bandwidth clients that are passing a lot of actual data, a piece of 'client' process on the server could talk XML with the data engine and then strip it down to something leaner and meaner and pass it on to the remote piece of the client (works both ways of course).

John S.

--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
People - Place - Learning - Integration
john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net




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