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Posted to c-users@xerces.apache.org by Will Sappington <ws...@ndma.us> on 2006/12/18 18:22:24 UTC
Xerces & libXml (was: Re: Was it something I said?)
Thanks for this info, this is the sort of thing I've been trying to find
without much success, a comparison of XML libraries describing their
strengths and weaknesses at accomplishing certain tasks. If anyone
knows where such a thing exists, or has experience to share, it would be
much appreciated.
We actually may have two conflicting sets of requirements. We provide a
medical record/image archival/retrieval service and XML is being used to
attach metadata to the records/images as part of the process. On the
front end where the XML is being generated, and analyzed in detail upon
retrieval/updating, the kind of robustness and interoperability you're
talking about below is probably the prime consideration. But in the
pipeline that transports this data back and forth, we only need to peek
into the XML for a few tags to figure out what kind of record/image it
is, what destination it needs to be sent to, and so on. Because we are
moving enormous amounts of data, speed is a critical factor because of
end-user response time requirements.
We may have to consider using both if libxml doesn't properly support
the more sophisticated stuff we may need to do on the front end. It's
definitely faster, initial results indicate about 3x, and therefore the
leading candidate for the back end and is small/light enough for what we
want to do with the configuration files. We'll have to see about the
front end stuff.
Thanks again for your insights, Jesse.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Pelton [mailto:jsp@PKC.com]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 8:57 AM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
Libxml is a great library with somewhat different goals than Xerces. I
don't think it's explicitly stated on the Web site, but Xerces and other
projects that build on it tend to implement W3C standards (DOM, XML
Schema), while libxml implements what its maintainer prefers (a unique
API, RelaxNG), with a focus on efficiency. Both approaches are
reasonable, and which is appropriate depends on your needs.
In your shoes, if I were certain that lighting a cigarette is all I
would ever need to do, I'd probably use libxml. In my experience,
though, XML is useful for so many things that I'd probably want to be
prepared to bake, boil, weld, and power fighter jets as well - in a
variety of local languages. I'm a nut for portability, and a DOM
interface has the advantage of being similar or identical in a wide
range of environments (C++, C#, JavaScript, etc).
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 5:21 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
Turns out XPath will do exactly what I need to do - select a unique
element (configuration item) from the file. We're going to XML for our
configuration files because it lets you do more sophisticated stuff than
a flat ini file parser can do. At this point it's sorta like using a
blowtorch to light a cigarette, but there will likely be a need for it
in the future.
Problem is, Xerces doesn't support XPath on its own, you have to bolt
Xalan or Pathan on top of it to do XPath. Now the blowtorch has become
a flame thrower. Since XML will be used throughout our system, not just
for config files, and speed is critical in some places, we've decided to
look at "libxml" instead. It supports XPath on its own, has a fast
XMLTextReader interface if you want to do a simple parse without
building the whole DOM tree, and in general, looks like it will be
better suited to what we're doing.
We haven't decided on which one yet, but libxml looks pretty good from
what I've done with it so far. If anyone has experience or knowledge of
both and can shed some light on the advantages/disadvantages of either,
I'd appreciate the insight.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Pelton [mailto:jsp@PKC.com]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:47 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
I can hazard a guess as to why I didn't respond at the time, based on my
re-reading of the message. My reaction to it just now was, "Hmm,
interesting question. I haven't done anything quite like that, and it
looks like it would take at least 15 or 20 minutes to craft a useful
response. Maybe someone else will pipe up." If you get a list full of
people with similar responses, it looks like your message has been
completely ignored, though in fact it hasn't. It's been read, but not
responded to. (In my experience, subscribers are reluctant to make
replies like, "Sorry, can't help," unless they think that nobody on the
list can help because you're barking up the wrong tree.)
I suppose someone could have said, "You seem to be on the right track.
Good luck." That would have been courteous, but bear in mind that this
list is an unorganized (distinct, I hope from disorganized) collection
of individuals who contribute for a variety of reasons, and there's no
one who oversees it all with an eye toward courtesy or any other
coherent behavior. I don't think you can attribute any particular
motivation to such a diverse group.
So, a belated welcome aboard. I don't think you were rude, and I doubt
anyone else intended to be. ;-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:30 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
I'm curious. Almost 2 weeks ago I submitted the question below and got
no response at all. I thought "OK, this must have been too much of a
basic noob question, they probably want me to go do some more homework
and come back when I can ask a more proper question". I didn't think
the question was all that basic, I was asking about an overall approach
to using Xerces to solve a problem, not how to install it, set up my
build environment, or write the code. So I went ahead and figured out
what I needed on my own.
Recently another new user has joined the group and has been asking for
and getting help on some pretty basic stuff like letting up VC++ with
the proper include paths for building and got a step-by-step "click
this, press that" response. I don't begrudge him the help he has been
getting in the slightest, in fact I'm glad to see that the group will
actually offer help at that level. My only question is "Why was my
question completely ignored?" Did I say something offensive, violate
some rule of etiquette, something like that? Just curious.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 11:15 AM
To: 'c-users@xerces.apache.org'
Subject: proper way to use Xerces for what I'm trying to do
I'm new to both XML and Xerces, literally starting from scratch. From
what I've seen in the documentation and some of the posts here, Xerces
provides a lot of capabilities and there may be more than one way to
accomplish a particular task. I'm trying to make sense of everything
and I have an idea for an approach to the task I've been assigned, but I
have no idea if it's a good approach or even the right way to do it.
I'm hoping that someone here can help me so I don't' spend too much time
going down dead-end paths.
Here's what I'm trying to do. Some of our applications are configured
with a hierarchical .ini file. There are 3 levels - application,
section (within an application), and item (within a section). Users of
the configuration utility class call a method getItem(appID,
sectionName, itemName) to retrieve the value of the requested item. The
.ini files are pretty standard flat text files with configuration items
specified as name/val pairs. We'd like to use XML instead of flat .ini
files.
I've gotten Xerces to build and run with the configuration utility, so
far I can do pretty simple stuff like getElementsByName() and walk node
lists, get their lengths and so on. I figure I can find a specific item
by walking node lists, but what I'd really like to have is a way of
directly accessing a unique element using its application/section/item
names. Someone here (my office) asked if I had tried an "xpath", I
don't know what that is, I'm gonna go find out, but I'm concerned that
there may be an approach using XML that is fundamentally different than
how you go about this using a flat file. That's what I'm looking to
find out first, if there's a general "best" way to do this sort of
thing, and then, whether yes or no, the specifics of how to implement
it. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
-will
RE: Xerces & libXml (was: Re: Was it something I said?)
Posted by Will Sappington <ws...@ndma.us>.
You're right, and the approach I first proposed was exactly what you
suggested, for exactly the same reasons. But to the guy who's
overseeing this, DOM is such a great hammer, now everything looks like a
nail. "You have to use DOM and XPath because that's what the standard
is." Well, no, SAX is a standard too and there's a reason it has been
developed as an alternative to DOM. But there was no convincing him so
we'll go the libxml+XPath route and if it turns out not to be fast
enough, well, the job of redoing everything can be his responsibility
'cuz it will be stated in my recommendations that the mandate to use
DOM/XPath was the reason for using libXml instead of Xerces/SAX. And
yeah, I know libXml doesn't do DOM in the strict W3C sense, but it has a
"DOM-like" interface that parses/loads the whole file into memory as a
node tree and allows you to work on it like a DOM tree. So we'll try
this and see how it does. Thanks for the help.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Pelton [mailto:jsp@PKC.com]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 1:36 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Xerces & libXml (was: Re: Was it something I said?)
In cases where performance is critical, I think you'd be best off
avoiding XPath altogether. If you use a simple SAX parser, you can
process whatever elements you need as they stream by and ignore
everything else, which saves processing time and memory. With XPath, I
imagine the entire document has to be parsed and in memory, then the
XPath expression interpreted and evaluated, before you get a result.
(The fact that this is the only model I can come up with may be a
failure of imagination, however.) XPath is incredibly powerful and
flexible, but you don't need all that (and its overhead) if you're
always executing one of a small number of queries that you know in
advance. An optimal Xerces SAX parser might well be more efficient than
libxml parsing + XPath evaluation.
Of course, XPath is a useful thing to have in your toolbox, and if you
include it now, you'll have that much more flexibility in the future.
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 12:22 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: Xerces & libXml (was: Re: Was it something I said?)
Thanks for this info, this is the sort of thing I've been trying to find
without much success, a comparison of XML libraries describing their
strengths and weaknesses at accomplishing certain tasks. If anyone
knows where such a thing exists, or has experience to share, it would be
much appreciated.
We actually may have two conflicting sets of requirements. We provide a
medical record/image archival/retrieval service and XML is being used to
attach metadata to the records/images as part of the process. On the
front end where the XML is being generated, and analyzed in detail upon
retrieval/updating, the kind of robustness and interoperability you're
talking about below is probably the prime consideration. But in the
pipeline that transports this data back and forth, we only need to peek
into the XML for a few tags to figure out what kind of record/image it
is, what destination it needs to be sent to, and so on. Because we are
moving enormous amounts of data, speed is a critical factor because of
end-user response time requirements.
We may have to consider using both if libxml doesn't properly support
the more sophisticated stuff we may need to do on the front end. It's
definitely faster, initial results indicate about 3x, and therefore the
leading candidate for the back end and is small/light enough for what we
want to do with the configuration files. We'll have to see about the
front end stuff.
Thanks again for your insights, Jesse.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Pelton [mailto:jsp@PKC.com]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 8:57 AM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
Libxml is a great library with somewhat different goals than Xerces. I
don't think it's explicitly stated on the Web site, but Xerces and other
projects that build on it tend to implement W3C standards (DOM, XML
Schema), while libxml implements what its maintainer prefers (a unique
API, RelaxNG), with a focus on efficiency. Both approaches are
reasonable, and which is appropriate depends on your needs.
In your shoes, if I were certain that lighting a cigarette is all I
would ever need to do, I'd probably use libxml. In my experience,
though, XML is useful for so many things that I'd probably want to be
prepared to bake, boil, weld, and power fighter jets as well - in a
variety of local languages. I'm a nut for portability, and a DOM
interface has the advantage of being similar or identical in a wide
range of environments (C++, C#, JavaScript, etc).
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 5:21 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
Turns out XPath will do exactly what I need to do - select a unique
element (configuration item) from the file. We're going to XML for our
configuration files because it lets you do more sophisticated stuff than
a flat ini file parser can do. At this point it's sorta like using a
blowtorch to light a cigarette, but there will likely be a need for it
in the future.
Problem is, Xerces doesn't support XPath on its own, you have to bolt
Xalan or Pathan on top of it to do XPath. Now the blowtorch has become
a flame thrower. Since XML will be used throughout our system, not just
for config files, and speed is critical in some places, we've decided to
look at "libxml" instead. It supports XPath on its own, has a fast
XMLTextReader interface if you want to do a simple parse without
building the whole DOM tree, and in general, looks like it will be
better suited to what we're doing.
We haven't decided on which one yet, but libxml looks pretty good from
what I've done with it so far. If anyone has experience or knowledge of
both and can shed some light on the advantages/disadvantages of either,
I'd appreciate the insight.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Pelton [mailto:jsp@PKC.com]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:47 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
I can hazard a guess as to why I didn't respond at the time, based on my
re-reading of the message. My reaction to it just now was, "Hmm,
interesting question. I haven't done anything quite like that, and it
looks like it would take at least 15 or 20 minutes to craft a useful
response. Maybe someone else will pipe up." If you get a list full of
people with similar responses, it looks like your message has been
completely ignored, though in fact it hasn't. It's been read, but not
responded to. (In my experience, subscribers are reluctant to make
replies like, "Sorry, can't help," unless they think that nobody on the
list can help because you're barking up the wrong tree.)
I suppose someone could have said, "You seem to be on the right track.
Good luck." That would have been courteous, but bear in mind that this
list is an unorganized (distinct, I hope from disorganized) collection
of individuals who contribute for a variety of reasons, and there's no
one who oversees it all with an eye toward courtesy or any other
coherent behavior. I don't think you can attribute any particular
motivation to such a diverse group.
So, a belated welcome aboard. I don't think you were rude, and I doubt
anyone else intended to be. ;-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:30 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
I'm curious. Almost 2 weeks ago I submitted the question below and got
no response at all. I thought "OK, this must have been too much of a
basic noob question, they probably want me to go do some more homework
and come back when I can ask a more proper question". I didn't think
the question was all that basic, I was asking about an overall approach
to using Xerces to solve a problem, not how to install it, set up my
build environment, or write the code. So I went ahead and figured out
what I needed on my own.
Recently another new user has joined the group and has been asking for
and getting help on some pretty basic stuff like letting up VC++ with
the proper include paths for building and got a step-by-step "click
this, press that" response. I don't begrudge him the help he has been
getting in the slightest, in fact I'm glad to see that the group will
actually offer help at that level. My only question is "Why was my
question completely ignored?" Did I say something offensive, violate
some rule of etiquette, something like that? Just curious.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 11:15 AM
To: 'c-users@xerces.apache.org'
Subject: proper way to use Xerces for what I'm trying to do
I'm new to both XML and Xerces, literally starting from scratch. From
what I've seen in the documentation and some of the posts here, Xerces
provides a lot of capabilities and there may be more than one way to
accomplish a particular task. I'm trying to make sense of everything
and I have an idea for an approach to the task I've been assigned, but I
have no idea if it's a good approach or even the right way to do it.
I'm hoping that someone here can help me so I don't' spend too much time
going down dead-end paths.
Here's what I'm trying to do. Some of our applications are configured
with a hierarchical .ini file. There are 3 levels - application,
section (within an application), and item (within a section). Users of
the configuration utility class call a method getItem(appID,
sectionName, itemName) to retrieve the value of the requested item. The
.ini files are pretty standard flat text files with configuration items
specified as name/val pairs. We'd like to use XML instead of flat .ini
files.
I've gotten Xerces to build and run with the configuration utility, so
far I can do pretty simple stuff like getElementsByName() and walk node
lists, get their lengths and so on. I figure I can find a specific item
by walking node lists, but what I'd really like to have is a way of
directly accessing a unique element using its application/section/item
names. Someone here (my office) asked if I had tried an "xpath", I
don't know what that is, I'm gonna go find out, but I'm concerned that
there may be an approach using XML that is fundamentally different than
how you go about this using a flat file. That's what I'm looking to
find out first, if there's a general "best" way to do this sort of
thing, and then, whether yes or no, the specifics of how to implement
it. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
-will
RE: Xerces & libXml (was: Re: Was it something I said?)
Posted by Jesse Pelton <js...@PKC.com>.
In cases where performance is critical, I think you'd be best off
avoiding XPath altogether. If you use a simple SAX parser, you can
process whatever elements you need as they stream by and ignore
everything else, which saves processing time and memory. With XPath, I
imagine the entire document has to be parsed and in memory, then the
XPath expression interpreted and evaluated, before you get a result.
(The fact that this is the only model I can come up with may be a
failure of imagination, however.) XPath is incredibly powerful and
flexible, but you don't need all that (and its overhead) if you're
always executing one of a small number of queries that you know in
advance. An optimal Xerces SAX parser might well be more efficient than
libxml parsing + XPath evaluation.
Of course, XPath is a useful thing to have in your toolbox, and if you
include it now, you'll have that much more flexibility in the future.
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 12:22 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: Xerces & libXml (was: Re: Was it something I said?)
Thanks for this info, this is the sort of thing I've been trying to find
without much success, a comparison of XML libraries describing their
strengths and weaknesses at accomplishing certain tasks. If anyone
knows where such a thing exists, or has experience to share, it would be
much appreciated.
We actually may have two conflicting sets of requirements. We provide a
medical record/image archival/retrieval service and XML is being used to
attach metadata to the records/images as part of the process. On the
front end where the XML is being generated, and analyzed in detail upon
retrieval/updating, the kind of robustness and interoperability you're
talking about below is probably the prime consideration. But in the
pipeline that transports this data back and forth, we only need to peek
into the XML for a few tags to figure out what kind of record/image it
is, what destination it needs to be sent to, and so on. Because we are
moving enormous amounts of data, speed is a critical factor because of
end-user response time requirements.
We may have to consider using both if libxml doesn't properly support
the more sophisticated stuff we may need to do on the front end. It's
definitely faster, initial results indicate about 3x, and therefore the
leading candidate for the back end and is small/light enough for what we
want to do with the configuration files. We'll have to see about the
front end stuff.
Thanks again for your insights, Jesse.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Pelton [mailto:jsp@PKC.com]
Sent: Monday, December 18, 2006 8:57 AM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
Libxml is a great library with somewhat different goals than Xerces. I
don't think it's explicitly stated on the Web site, but Xerces and other
projects that build on it tend to implement W3C standards (DOM, XML
Schema), while libxml implements what its maintainer prefers (a unique
API, RelaxNG), with a focus on efficiency. Both approaches are
reasonable, and which is appropriate depends on your needs.
In your shoes, if I were certain that lighting a cigarette is all I
would ever need to do, I'd probably use libxml. In my experience,
though, XML is useful for so many things that I'd probably want to be
prepared to bake, boil, weld, and power fighter jets as well - in a
variety of local languages. I'm a nut for portability, and a DOM
interface has the advantage of being similar or identical in a wide
range of environments (C++, C#, JavaScript, etc).
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 5:21 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
Turns out XPath will do exactly what I need to do - select a unique
element (configuration item) from the file. We're going to XML for our
configuration files because it lets you do more sophisticated stuff than
a flat ini file parser can do. At this point it's sorta like using a
blowtorch to light a cigarette, but there will likely be a need for it
in the future.
Problem is, Xerces doesn't support XPath on its own, you have to bolt
Xalan or Pathan on top of it to do XPath. Now the blowtorch has become
a flame thrower. Since XML will be used throughout our system, not just
for config files, and speed is critical in some places, we've decided to
look at "libxml" instead. It supports XPath on its own, has a fast
XMLTextReader interface if you want to do a simple parse without
building the whole DOM tree, and in general, looks like it will be
better suited to what we're doing.
We haven't decided on which one yet, but libxml looks pretty good from
what I've done with it so far. If anyone has experience or knowledge of
both and can shed some light on the advantages/disadvantages of either,
I'd appreciate the insight.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Jesse Pelton [mailto:jsp@PKC.com]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:47 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: RE: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
I can hazard a guess as to why I didn't respond at the time, based on my
re-reading of the message. My reaction to it just now was, "Hmm,
interesting question. I haven't done anything quite like that, and it
looks like it would take at least 15 or 20 minutes to craft a useful
response. Maybe someone else will pipe up." If you get a list full of
people with similar responses, it looks like your message has been
completely ignored, though in fact it hasn't. It's been read, but not
responded to. (In my experience, subscribers are reluctant to make
replies like, "Sorry, can't help," unless they think that nobody on the
list can help because you're barking up the wrong tree.)
I suppose someone could have said, "You seem to be on the right track.
Good luck." That would have been courteous, but bear in mind that this
list is an unorganized (distinct, I hope from disorganized) collection
of individuals who contribute for a variety of reasons, and there's no
one who oversees it all with an eye toward courtesy or any other
coherent behavior. I don't think you can attribute any particular
motivation to such a diverse group.
So, a belated welcome aboard. I don't think you were rude, and I doubt
anyone else intended to be. ;-)
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington [mailto:wsappington@ndma.us]
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2006 3:30 PM
To: c-users@xerces.apache.org
Subject: Was it something I said? (was: proper way to use Xerces for
what I'm trying to do)
I'm curious. Almost 2 weeks ago I submitted the question below and got
no response at all. I thought "OK, this must have been too much of a
basic noob question, they probably want me to go do some more homework
and come back when I can ask a more proper question". I didn't think
the question was all that basic, I was asking about an overall approach
to using Xerces to solve a problem, not how to install it, set up my
build environment, or write the code. So I went ahead and figured out
what I needed on my own.
Recently another new user has joined the group and has been asking for
and getting help on some pretty basic stuff like letting up VC++ with
the proper include paths for building and got a step-by-step "click
this, press that" response. I don't begrudge him the help he has been
getting in the slightest, in fact I'm glad to see that the group will
actually offer help at that level. My only question is "Why was my
question completely ignored?" Did I say something offensive, violate
some rule of etiquette, something like that? Just curious.
-will
-----Original Message-----
From: Will Sappington
Sent: Monday, December 04, 2006 11:15 AM
To: 'c-users@xerces.apache.org'
Subject: proper way to use Xerces for what I'm trying to do
I'm new to both XML and Xerces, literally starting from scratch. From
what I've seen in the documentation and some of the posts here, Xerces
provides a lot of capabilities and there may be more than one way to
accomplish a particular task. I'm trying to make sense of everything
and I have an idea for an approach to the task I've been assigned, but I
have no idea if it's a good approach or even the right way to do it.
I'm hoping that someone here can help me so I don't' spend too much time
going down dead-end paths.
Here's what I'm trying to do. Some of our applications are configured
with a hierarchical .ini file. There are 3 levels - application,
section (within an application), and item (within a section). Users of
the configuration utility class call a method getItem(appID,
sectionName, itemName) to retrieve the value of the requested item. The
.ini files are pretty standard flat text files with configuration items
specified as name/val pairs. We'd like to use XML instead of flat .ini
files.
I've gotten Xerces to build and run with the configuration utility, so
far I can do pretty simple stuff like getElementsByName() and walk node
lists, get their lengths and so on. I figure I can find a specific item
by walking node lists, but what I'd really like to have is a way of
directly accessing a unique element using its application/section/item
names. Someone here (my office) asked if I had tried an "xpath", I
don't know what that is, I'm gonna go find out, but I'm concerned that
there may be an approach using XML that is fundamentally different than
how you go about this using a flat file. That's what I'm looking to
find out first, if there's a general "best" way to do this sort of
thing, and then, whether yes or no, the specifics of how to implement
it. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
-will