I want to throw out a question to find out what people think is the way forward for this API. Basically what are people hoping to get out of it?
The reason I'm asking is because there has been very little activity based on the last draft that was posted. I expected that to at least spark some comment or maybe even cries of outrage but it has been very quiet instead. I'll state the current goal of the API is to provide the ability to build applications that can move easily from one vendors product to another. The current path being followed to achieve this goal is to develop a specification for drivers (Database in the current API) that can be implemented by the various vendors and used in combination with a driver manager (DatabaseManager in the API) that is provided by XML:DB. This is the path followed by Sun with JDBC and Microsoft with ODBC so it can work if the vendors are willing to support it. Now times have changed a lot since both ODBC and JDBC were developed and Open Source has become a very viable way of developing software to achieve the same goal. An example of this would be Perl DBI and SAX. So what I wanted to throw out was the question of would it be of more value to us to focus more on implementation and less on specification? What I mean is should the output of this project be not only a driver manager and specification but also the drivers? One stated goal of XML:DB is to develop specs and reference implementations of those specs so this isn't inconsistent. We're so early in the XML database game and everyone's implementations are so immature and so different that a comprehensive spec is going to be very difficult to develop. Basically I'm thinking a simple usable API with a few drivers in 3 months is much more valuable then waiting a year for us to fully detail a spec and then get some initial implementations. A detailed spec would come too but it would be born more out of implementation experience rather then thin air. For my personal opinion I'm really looking at how we get XML database usage to increase and having available even a very basic API that works more or less the same on several products should go a long way to making this happen. I'm looking for discussion here, what do people really want to get out of this thing? BTW, I've done an implementation (Java) of the spec as it stands now for dbXML and have been looking at what it would take to do it for Tamino and Excelon as well. -- Kimbro Staken Chief Technology Officer dbXML Group L.L.C http://www.dbxmlgroup.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Post a message: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact adminstrator: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Read archived messages: http://archive.xmldb.org/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------
