XML article bemoaning.
I am not sure how some articles get published, it seems that they either have no reviews or
the reviews are not open enough in saying "just kill this". For example this article
called DOM for Web
Services, Part 1 is just a blatant contraction. All this does is load a WDSL
file to generate an HTML page, something that can be achieved easily by writing
to a stream. Why use the XML DOM to do any message based processing. The article
even starts with statement;
"Note that we acknowledge that DOM is not always the only or best way to process either
XML or web services, but it has advantages in ubiquity and deployment."
Ubiquity and deployment! What planet are you living on! Where does deployment fit
with the DOM! The DOM is a dying API, superced by improved XML stores such as
the JDOM and in .NET the XPathDocument, now that this is editable in the System.Xml
"Whidbey" release.
Then I read the next article titled Using
Embedded XML Databases to Process Large Documents. The first three paragraphs
talk about how hard it is to program XML APIs, particulary SAX and so you should use
an XML database instead. How about use a simpler pull model XML parser like the XmlTextReader
and then you're done.Although using this appraoch to search through a large collection
of XML documents is reasonable, there is still the DB management overhead that is
incured. I just wish these articles were more balanced other than promoting some feature
that the author happened to favor or discover whilst playing with some code one night.