[jdom-interest] XMLOutputter andnewlinesafterdeclaration/doctype

[Ingo Struck]

Hi...

> Sooner or later everyone who tries to do this learns this lesson: you
> need a parser to handle XML. Nothing less will do. If a parser is too
> heavyweight for you (which is rarely true), then you need to use
> something other than XML.
Yep, that's a true word, you *need* a parser anyway and that's what
prohibits XML from being able to scale up, since *any* parser is
*always* the main bottleneck (a structural problem, not implementation
specific as I already stated before).

To cite a friend of mine:

"XML is in widespread use as a lingua franca for glueing software components 
together. Several tools for this can be found at xml.apache.org. 
What is missing here is an efficient, easy to use way of storing XML data."

That's the main problem anybody encounters nowadays trying to build up
large scale apps with native xml solutions. There are some few rather 
effective XML data stores around, alas they are *really* expensive.

To continue the cite above:
"Only the most trivial cases are easily mapped onto the relational data model, 
which uses flat records, consisting of a fixed number of fields. The data 
structures modelled in XML typically have a variable number of childs. 
Hierarchical databases like ADABAS C are well suited and actually used by 
SoftwareAG in their Tamino XML DB, but aren't widely and freely available.
We claim that most real-world XML data structures can be easily and 
efficiently mapped to the data model of ISO2709 [...]"

So a real benefit would be an efficient opensource XML storage system, 
whatever it looks like.

And here you go with my X-Mas wish for the future of XML:
Hopefully some project with this goal (efficient opensource XML storage / 
retrieval system) with a strict focus on scalability and performance will 
emerge soon and provide a viable solution for that problem.

Kind regards & Happy X-Mas

Ingo Struck