Re: some notes

["Odile Bénassy" <obenassy@magic.fr>]

Hi everybody !

Although it is not a direct answer, what I have to say is more or less
related to what Bruno says below, therefore I write on the same thread.

Ok, I understand what XML is, an extension to HTML, making imaginative
customizing possible - is it right ?

Then, I more or less know what a database is, and I thought SQL was the
only way to ensure speed on frequent switches with large DBs.

Then, it appears possible to store data in XML coding.

Teresa Fernandes has written a lot of code to transfer XML into java
(JDBC) to enable DB connection.

Now Bruno speaks of NOSQL.

Why does everybody want to (kill)avoid SQL ?


--- Odile Bénassy ---

PS1: yes, I've heard about PHP, I know it is very useful. Yet I have no
clear vision of all these things, and even less of their
interdependences. 
PS2: Bruno, I very much would like to give a little stone to your
project. I just don't know exaltly how (yet). Did you read my database
specification ? 
PS3: Thanks to Pete St Onge, who bravely read my /~ob stuff and gave me
a whole pages of comments. And to Doug Ort as well, for his words of
encouragement.

-----------------------
Bruno Vernier wrote:
> 
> Here are some random notes relating to my current work on EDUML:
> 
> 1. I finally got gnumeric to work without crashing (latest version 0.7-1.1)
>    and it is a beauty... it is a masterpiece.
> 
> It saves directly in XML format using namespaces so that it looks like it
> will integrate beautifully with EDUML the trick is to not be fooled by the
> apparent binary nature of the saved files; gnumeric automatically gzips the
> XML file (I got caught :-)
> 
> 2. PHP3 now includes XML functions (DOM) which makes it a very stable language
>    for the web version of EDUML.  Furthermore, I think PHP3 is far easier to
>    wrap my brain around that CGI-BIN.  The documentation for PHP3 is
>    particularly well done (using DOCBOOK SGML) and I will field test the idea
>    of using my students to write PHP3 scripts for EDUML because I think it is
>    well within their reach.
> 
> For those who have not heard of PHP3, it is a web programming language which
> looks and feel like java and perl but somehow looks and feel simpler than
> either.  It is used on 150,000  websites around the world.  It requires APACHE
> with PHP3 module configured on.  To use it, simply create a web page with a
> .php3  instead of .html extension.  Then write in normal HTML except when you
> want to do some PHP3 programming, or shell calls to the server or whatever,
> just add the following processing instruction as a tag element:
> 
> <?php  code snippet goes here ?>
> 
> 3. NOSQL is a package for doing relational database manipulations without SQL
> (hence the name) ... it is completely text based and also very easy to wrap
> one's mind around.  I've been using it for 4-5 years to manage my educational
> data (and still do).  It is 100% unix philosophy; a bunch of small programs
> that perform one task well and which can be piped and redirected to each other
> and to other unix tools at will.
> 
>   http://www.mi.linux.it/nosql/
> 
> Anyways, there is much debate among the XML crowd as to whether to aim for
> pure 100% XML or a mixture of RDB (relational Database) and XML.
> Oracle for example is becoming such a mixture.  So I've been toying with the
> idea of using NOSQL to store XML snippets thus benefitting from the best of
> both worlds.  The same would apply for postgres95 (the free source binary rdb)
> or any of the commercial rdb our schools use.
> 
> End of my random thoughts,
> 
> Bruno