New client API idea

[Ryan Hoegg <rh...@isisnetworks.net>]

Hello,

In my current project, I am using an XML-RPC API from another company. 
 It has the potential to return very large responses, which have taken 
up to 5 minutes to stream in real world usage and could take much longer 
I suppose.

I have spent some hours thinking over ways to streamline the client side 
code and would like to implement something like SAX or XML pull parsers 
for the client.  That is, I am thinking that a user would specify 
somehow (JXPath?) a repeated piece of the response and then the client 
would either A) execute a method on a listener (like SAX) or B) Make 
available in a queue (like XML pull parsing) that piece.  Example:
a response has a struct that contains among other things an array.  That 
array contains structs.  Perhaps the user could specify 
responseModel.getStruct().getMember("myarray").  Then, the parser would 
stop and create the appropriate java objects and return them each time 
it receives a complete struct inside myarray.  I still haven't decided 
whether a push or pull event model makes more sense.

I will probably be doing a spike on this sometime next week, so I'd 
appreciate anyone's input on this stuff.

--
Ryan Hoegg
ISIS Networks
http://www.isisnetworks.net