XML is definitly one of those emotional issues in the tech world!
Those who grok it don't understand why those who don't love it won't
use it everywhere. And those who dislike it can't see the benefits
often of XML because of their bad experiences.
I know I just spent a week mucking around with an application where I
couldn't start it up because of XML validation errors. Errors
generated not because the XML was wrong, but because the validation
process was borked up. It led me down a rat hole of frustration
chasing Schemas and DTDs and validating parsers... I think that
frustration is part of what has pushed people to embrace JSON, YML,
and other approaches for encoding data.
The biggest thing I love about Solr is "it just works...". It's
simple. It's powerful. You don't have to commit months to
understanding it. And yet if you want to do advanced things then Solr
is fairly forgiving of that, and gives you the hooks/plugins to do it.
Is this the opportunity of having more then one XML output type? I
mean, XML is meant to be a transport medium for data, and maybe moving
from a "one true XML output" for Solr to being able to support
multiple outputs dependent on the consumer would be useful. I can see
it making it easier to plug Solr into environments that expect data in
certain formats, without doing an extra XSL transformation?
Eric
On Dec 9, 2009, at 2:11 PM, Mattmann, Chris A (388J) wrote:
Hi Yonik:
If you're forced to declare the namespace / put the URI, I'm just
afraid of what clients / XML parsers out there may start trying to
validate by default.
And even if they did, it's valid XML so what's the problem?
And I'm still trying to figure out what we gain.
* plugging into other standard GIS tools
(here's a list of georss ones:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&fkt=1998&fsdt=4214&q=georss
+readers&a
q=f&aqi=g1&oq=&fp=b36c7832dbb01be6
)
* understanding that a <point is not a <solr:point (which in your
examples
you're using a ',' to separate them while e.g., georss suggests a '
') but a
georss:point. From this you can:
- look up the field definition
- generate default values
- understand the unit restrictions
There is a wealth of work in XML schema so I'm not sure I have to
justify
its use.
If one does want validation, it seems like we should have an
(optional) schema for the XML response as a whole?
I'm happy to provide this, for validation, but let's start small,
then grow
big. SOLR-1586 does _not_ break anything.
Cheers,
Chris
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Senior Computer Scientist
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Pasadena, CA 91109 USA
Office: 171-266B, Mailstop: 171-246
Email: chris.mattm...@jpl.nasa.gov
WWW: http://sunset.usc.edu/~mattmann/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department University of
Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 USA
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
-----------------------------------------------------
Eric Pugh | Principal | OpenSource Connections, LLC | 434.466.1467 |
http://www.opensourceconnections.com
Co-Author: Solr 1.4 Enterprise Search Server available from
http://www.packtpub.com/solr-1-4-enterprise-search-server
Free/Busy: http://tinyurl.com/eric-cal
