[Scrollkeeper-devel] Scrollkeeper backend

[Bob S. <bo...@sc...>]

> From: Ali Abdin <ali...@au...>

> > You just contradicted yourself and confused me. If the XML is a purely
> > internal data structure, why is Nautilus reading it?
> 
> Yes, I did contradict myself :) 
> 
> Its not really an internal data structure or file format.
> 
> It is an external one, and instead of devising our own, we used an easily
> parsable existing one...XML. I mean if you really want we could use a fast
> binary database, but I doubt people would appreciate that ;)

I completely agree that XML is a good standard format to export
data to applications like a help browser.  And of course
the incoming data is XML (the OMF files).  

But I think there is room in the current design for a
backend using a fast binary database to house the metadata.
Whether it will be appreciated depends entirely on the
applications that might use it.  Scrollkeeper could be used
to keep track of metadata for thousands of documents.
Those documents might be served upon request by an HTTP
server, after a query engine processes a metadata request.
You won't want to scan a big XML metadata document for each
such request.

I'm thinking that Scrollkeeper could maintain an internal
lightweight database of the OMF data.  A database is easy
to update when one OMF file added, changed, or deleted. And you
can extract an XML Content List in various forms as
queries and reports from the database.  The source of the
data will always be the original OMF files, so you can
still rebuild the database from scratch.
But a database would give sk greater flexibility and
performance in making the metadata available to different
applications.

I'm not volunteering anyone else's copious free time
to do this.  8^)
If the group is interested, I'd be happy to 
pursue this area a little further.  There are several
available technologies that might fit the bill.

bobs
Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
Publications Architect                      Santa Cruz, CA  95060
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                                            email: bo...@sc...