[xml] Introduction Ideas and Brain Dump

[James Michael DuPont <mdupont777 yahoo com>]

Hello, 
My name is James Michael DuPont,
I have been working on creating an XML/PERL/SQL
interface into the GCC intermediate tree
representation, the introspector.sf.net project.

Over the course of my playing with XML I have come up
with some ideas that I wanted to talk to you all
about.

I have been thinking about using the in-memory DOM of
the LIBXML for doing a couple of following things. 

I hope that you find these ideas good.
Many are probably really old and not interesting,
but for me I find them interesting.

Maybe this can all be implemented by modules jus
passing trees around?

The idea is to be able to plug in a set of backends
and post processors into libxml2 and be able to work
with that as a data transfer system.

1. Transfer of data between programs without external
representation. That would allow for an XML link
interface between GPL programs without needing to
transfer the data into a file. Perl could link to it
as a lib and be called back. That would eliminate any
copyright and linking issues that I currently have
with the gcc.

2. Persistent storage of data structures.
the ability to map the data in memory onto a database
access layer. Right now I use perl and
DBI/DBD::Postgres and Mysql.
I found the following links that look interesting :
> > http://www.xmldb.org/index.html
> > XUpdate http://www.xmldb.org/xupdate/

3. Visualisation of data structures,
  by transforming the XML into a graph language and
visualization by VCG or GraphVis.  
availabe at  
http://xml.coverpages.org/xgmml.html or
http://www.xml.com/pub/r/723

4. Diffing of database structures.
Once a packet of data is in a DOM we can diff them.
The diff could be made on the structure and on the
content. Maybe some form of cvs or diff modification?

This is done by a couple of programs :
 http://www.logilab.org/xmldiff/
 http://diffxml.sourceforge.net/

5. Storing a transformation routine between a C data
structure and a XML dom object representing it. 

That will come done to keeping the XML document 
that is normally outputted just as a Text file
instanciated in memory and X-ref-ed to the memory
structures in the the program.

C OBJECT -->points to---> XML Representation in
memory --> points back to --> C Object

The XML object can be updated and queried with effects
on the C object, and vice versa. Both are just
different views and encodings on the same abstract

Some form of notification mechanism would be cool, as
well as a URI PUT and GET mechanism.

Anyway, I hope to hear from you, and look forward to
working with you.

Mike

=====
James Michael DuPont

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