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rhino wrote:
I'm getting very interested in XML, especially in using Java to create and
update XML files. However, the documents I'm reading about XML at IBM
Developer Works are, for the most part, quite dated with dates in 2002 and
earlier being typical.
The basic APIs haven't changed very much since then.
For example, having to use DOM to read an entire XML document in
order to insert a single element seems like a pretty dubious way of doing
something.
That's a classic example of a task which may be better handled by using
SAX-based processing rather than a DOM... which is, in fact, similar to
your tape analogy. See discussion of SAX vs. DOM at
http://www.w3.org/DOM/faq.html#SAXandDOM
On the other hand, if you're going to do a lot of this, XML may be the
wrong data representation. It's perfectly reasonable, and often
desirable, to use XML as your format for communicating data between
applications but to use something more specialized within the
application... a custom data structure, or a database. (Plug: IBM's DB2
now has native support for both relational AND XML-structural data.
Claimer: I'm with IBM, and contributed some of the ideas to that effort.)
I was also intrigued by Xindice but I'm not clear if this is a popular
approach or just an idea that never really amounted to anything.
I don't know the status of that particular project. It's an Apache
effort, so it probably has a mailing list for its users/contributors;
that'd be the best place to ask to find out current status. The website
says the most recent official version was released December of last year.
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