In particular, XML creates only trees naturally, for graphs you need to
use references (for example, by using RDF), at which point some of the
"simplicity" benefits are gone. An OODB exposes the object graph in it's
natural form.

OTOH, most of the people I've met that said "but I want to be able to
move my object from one node to the other, so I need to serialize it
into XML" had simply not thought out their application through.
Communications often occur at a different level than representation -
speech doesn't actually consitute telepathy. 

Daniel

Lorenzo Schiavina <lorenzo at edor.it> wrote:
> I have the same experience
> 
> Lorenzo Schiavina
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <goran.hultgren at bluefish.se>
> To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
> <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
> Sent: Thursday, March 27, 2003 10:04 PM
> Subject: Re: [OT] XML technology as general data store in programs ?
> 
> 
> > HNBeck at t-online.de (Hans Nikolaus Beck) wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > because this list are many people which are close to computer science
> > > research ;-) , I would ask here:
> > > would it by a design option to use XML and related standards as a
> > > general technology for storing data in programs ? Or let's say as a
> > > thesis:  XML( DOM) XQuery, XPath etc. should be used as a kind of
> > > "memory database" instead of the tons of special data structures a
> > > developer creates in his life for his data  (especially in c/c++ the
> > > structs, unions) ? And because of the typeless of squeak language it is
> > > easy to  doing so, as I've seen in my current work with yaxo and XPath.
> > > But there is  one weakness: it seems to me that XML, XPath and
> > > especially XSLT are far more oriented to functional programming then
> > > objectorientation. Or would it be really declarative ?
> > > So would the thesis above hold for Squeak  ? How important is XML for
> > > squeak (croquet) ?
> >
> > Well, having worked with relational databases, objectoriented databases
> > and a fair bit of XML I would say that XML is fine for:
> >
> > 1. Establishing "language neutral ground". Like people are doing with
> > SOAP and document formats using XML.
> > 2. Rather easily describing semi-complex (it gets hard if the structures
> > are *really* complex) structures.
> >
> > One of the major good points of XML is that it is very well defined.
> >
> > But... personally I would say that a "real" OODB is much better for
> > representing/storing complex object models.
> >
> > regards, Göran
> >
> >
> >
> >