On Thursday, July 18, 2002, at 12:50 PM, Fernando Padilla wrote:
So what are you thinking? I'm just going to plan to continue going over the code as I'm doing, but I'll assume that I can do an aggressive scrub down.
What you're doing is very, very helpful, I'd just focus on the other packages and ignore server. Also if you're serious about this we should probably look into getting you commit if you want it.
For replacing server, we've thrown a couple things on the table. Using Avalon is one, and just running under a servlet engine is another. The servlet engine idea appeals to me the most, simply because it would have a lot of flexibility and would be relatively simple. It would also probably be less efficient, but I suspect that really won't matter as most of the runtime cost is going to/should be in the core database anyway. We could also take a similar route to Cocoon, where we use the support pieces of Avalon, but run under a servlet engine. I don't know, I still haven't taken the time to study Avalon in depth.
There's also some interesting possibilities architecturally from the servlet engine scenario. For instance, if you're building a servlet application you could run your application and the database in the same VM,
while still enabling concurrent access via the command line tools and other tools like Attrezzo per Xindice. So you'd get the benefit of using an embedded database, without the need to shut down your application to use other tools. For larger applications, or non-servlet applications, you would run a standalone servlet engine that just hosts a Xindice instance.
Really though, my main goal is to just move most of the issues in this area outside of this project. We have a ton of work to do on the database engine itself, the rest is really secondary. This is why I'm trying to cut away as much code as possible. We may compromise the flexibility of the software in the short term, but if we don't improve the core database this project will become irrelevant very quickly.
Kimbro Staken Java and XML Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/ Apache Xindice native XML database http://xml.apache.org/xindice XML:DB Initiative http://www.xmldb.org
