Adriaan,
Just read your article “Comparing XML database approaches”. Nice article. Just wondering your thoughts on “NXD’s” nowadays. Seems like it’s still a niche market but is it dying?
We have our own grammar called CAAML (http://code.google.com/p/caaml/). We are basically a data warehouse for everything avalanche in Canada with recent interest from European countries and the US. I have implemented a small web application on top of the eXist solution which seems to be working great. I am not getting much support from my more experienced peers though. For me its quite clear that NXD is a very good fit. What am I missing?
Thank you for your input.
Sincerely,
Yves Richard - IT Manager
Hello Yves,
Thank you for your e-mail. It is nice to see your work on CAAML. This looks like an interesting and well-designed XML format. Also nice to hear you are experimenting with eXist.
I'm not sure I can answer your questions reliably. A lot of these things are personal opinions and personal preference. Nevertheless, here is what I think:
I do not think the market for XML databases (native or hybrid) is dying. Some business domains are ahead of others in the adoption of XML technologies. For example, publishing companies use more and more XML to facilitate concepts like "single source publishing". If you write content once and store it in XML, you can publish to paper, the internet, mobile devices or anything else.
The majority of webservices (not only WSDL/SOAP but also REST) use XML as exchange format. Webservices are so widely adopted, it is hard to imagine a world without them.
I think more and more people are slowly realizing that if your input is XML and your output is XML (XHTML), then it is inefficient to translate XML to objects or relational structures in between. On the other hand it seems many software developers are trying to eliminate XML from their code as much as possible because of personal preference.
I'm not sure how to resolve differences in personal preferences between several team members. Showing working examples like you're doing with the small web application should be the best way. I don't think you're missing something.
I hope that showing concise, efficient XQuery code and pointing out the savings in implementation time can help convince your peers to give the technology a chance.
Good luck with your project!
Kind regards,
Adriaan.
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