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