Re: Serialization Analysis and Proposal

On 5/16/07, Alex Milowski <alex@milowski.org> wrote:
> 1.  We need serialization options on the p:store and p:http-request
>      steps.  p:http-request could be used to store a document over
>      webdav (which is HTTP based) and so is just like p:store in that
>      regard.

This is the approach we took when we started with XPL. Then we
realized there were quite a few components that do serialization of
some sort. Some are obvious like storing XML in a file or responding
to an HTTP request. But there are number of other cases, like storing
XML as a CLOB in a database, POSTing/PUTing XML (HTTP), saving a piece
of XML in the session (identified by a cookie), etc.

So instead of having serialization options on all those components, we
created one component that does XML serialization into an XML document
with just a root element. We called this a converter. And all the
components work with this pre-serialized form.

The same intermediary format is used for "pre-serialized" binary data.
Think of an XSL-FO component that produced content (say a PDF) which
can then be stored in database as a CLOB, stored on a FTP server, or
sent back in an HTTP response, without the final step knowing anything
about XSL-FO.

Alex
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Orbeon Forms - Web 2.0 Forms for the Enterprise
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Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2007 14:16:02 UTC