Hello all! I've just added an add-on for Firefox which uses Sedna; I'm calling it "XDIB" or "XML Database In a Browser". See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/199900/ .
Basically, this lets any web developer, who is given permission by the user, to add XML content to Sedna (databases stored in Firefox's Profile folder by default, so that the data will not be lost whenever the extension may get updated) and then query it, update it, etc.. Actually, we've basically wrapped every command there is in Sedna (though removing "Sedna" from the methods in case this could become abstracted--sorry, no XQJ at the moment), though I haven't really tested anything besides loading XML and doing XQueries against data in a collection. At the moment, the databases are accessible to any site which requests permission, as I wanted this to be the default behavior, since I think it should be up to users how they want their data shared, and not have their own data be locked in by a particular site, even if that site originated the storage of the data. The access is granted depending on whether read permissions, insert permissions, etc., are desired, and I really need to add the ability to specify which database one has permission to access, since for now, it is any one! (though it does ask permission at least). I also hope to make the API available as special protocol links, so a link could trigger the view of certain content, and if my other add-on, Open URIs (at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/162154/ ) is used together with this, one could link to locally stored by default, but fallback to an online site in case the user is visiting the site without this add-on installed. I like the idea of bookmarks that work offline, and which could do fancy queries, and trigger a download of the data (and subsequent auto-updates) if the data had not yet been downloaded. But that's not implemented at the moment... I paid a friend to implement the C++ code which as part of an XPCOM component for Mozilla's Cross-Platform Component Object Model, among other things, lets JavaScript communicate with C++ so that people like me who do not know C++ can still write Firefox extensions or the like which interact with cool tools or libraries like Sedna, so my apologies if anything has been lost in translation as far as how the API is to be used (though I know it is working for XQueries at least--though I do need help on figuring out how Sedna can support UTF-8 if it uses "const char" as I understand that to be ASCII only; the component may need to be updated to support multi-byte strings). And since my friend is a Windows guy, we've only compiled so far in Windows, but since this is supposed to be cross-platform, hopefully we can get this working on other systems as well. As I mention on the add-on site, the API is of course very much new (not to mention there may well be problems in our code), so while we are whole-heartedly encouraging experimentation, please do not use this for critical content, nor depend on the API remaining frozen. I have the off-hope that we could get XML databases to be part of HTML5; e.g., see the debate at http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/beyond-html5-database-apis-and-the-road-to-indexeddb/ or http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/06/comparing-indexeddb-and-webdatabase/comment-page-1/#comment-95595 . My energy is fairly limited as far as what I can contribute, but I do hope to make piecemeal progress on this, and fully welcome anyone interested to offer their feedback, improvements, or whatever... :) (I've cc'd myself if you wish to get in touch off-list to indicate you wish to be kept informed.) best wishes, Brett ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ This SF.net email is sponsored by Sprint What will you do first with EVO, the first 4G phone? Visit sprint.com/first -- http://p.sf.net/sfu/sprint-com-first _______________________________________________ Sedna-discussion mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sedna-discussion
