XPath-Persistence

[Christian Albrecht <ch...@web.de>]

Hi,

I used empire-db for several projects now and I think it's a great tool. For a recent project however, I had to talk to an XML-database. I was wondering if I could take the principles and ideas of empire-db and adapt them for that purpose. One could use a dtd or xml-schema instance to create the database class and write the queries with XPath or XQuery (which would probably be a Goliath project, since it's quite complex). However XPath is a W3C-recommendation with a fixed simple grammar, so it should be quite simple to map this grammar to the Java object model and with this beeing able to create string free XPath expressions. Metadata about elements and attributes can also be represented in a similar fashion as empire-db already does it.
Let me know your opinions!

Christian

Re: XPath-Persistence

[Andreas Fink <an...@andreasfink.com>]

Hi Christian.

If you want to query a xml-db with xpath or xquery why would you need a layer like empire-db at all?
All xml-db's i know (xindice, exist, ...) have at least support for xpath built in.
The only useful functionality would be an abstraction over the vendor specific code like building connections to the db and firing queries in case you need to switch implementations frequently (This requirement is a myth IMO ;-).

Cheers,
Andi.

On Jun 7, 2011, at 2:38 PM, Christian Albrecht wrote:

> I used empire-db for several projects now and I think it's a great tool. For a recent project however, I had to talk to an XML-database. I was wondering if I could take the principles and ideas of empire-db and adapt them for that purpose. One could use a dtd or xml-schema instance to create the database class and write the queries with XPath or XQuery (which would probably be a Goliath project, since it's quite complex). However XPath is a W3C-recommendation with a fixed simple grammar, so it should be quite simple to map this grammar to the Java object model and with this beeing able to create string free XPath expressions. Metadata about elements and attributes can also be represented in a similar fashion as empire-db already does it.
> Let me know your opinions!

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