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...to be inexpensive, flexible, extensible, and yet easy to manage.

Since the clients environment and business needs are constantly changing, the company didn't want to spend excessive time on support and maintenance of internal applications. The solution also needed to leverage the effort EDS put into creating and maintaining XML documentation around these data services.

To create the solution, EDS used two open source technologies--Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML (bdbxml) (www.sleep ycat.com) and Cocoon (http://cocoon. apache.org). The Apache Cocoon product provides the XML.-based application framework, while the bdbxml product is an application-specific data manager providing XML persistence and retrieval. The combined technology creates a flexible, powerful framework for qnickly building and deploying customized XML-based applications.

The Software

Apache Cocoon, an XML publishing framework, employs a dynamic pipeline-processing concept that generates, manipulates, and ultimately renders the XML content into the presentation format of the user's choosing. Generic templates exist for rendering XML to standard formats such as HTML and PDF. The framework is easily configurable and extensible for custom XML-based applications. A significant portion of this configuration and customization is accomplished through XML documents that detail the pipeline steps necessary for a custom application.

The Cocoon pipeline consists of three types of components--generators, transformers, and serializers. A generator, the starting point for any given pipeline, produces the XML that is processed by the pipeline. Transformers can manipulate the XML as needed or perform operations based upon the XML content. Multiple transformers can be employed as needed. Finally, a serializer renders the final XML content (the result of the last transform) into a presentation format. The XML is passed through the pipeline as SAX events.

From a content application perspective, EDS used Cocoon to deliver dynamic content to analysts who were researching or testing nor XML services. Conceptually, this process is common, and several products would have sufficed.

The Cocoon project provided the additional benefits of being:

* Flexible and extensible

* Open source

* Free

With all XML-driven application server like Cocoon, we also found we needed an XML storage medium. Apache has built in support for the Xindice XML product. However, Xindice is a pure-Java XML database with a Java API. We found we wanted support for nun-Java APIs. Additionally, we desired an application-specific data manager, which allows flexible integration at various architectural levels.

This criterion led us to Sleepycat's bdbxml.

Introducing Berkeley DB XML

Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML product (bdbxml) is built on the company's Berkeley DB product, it is designed to store and retrieve XML documents and provides XPath querying capabilities against the set of stored documents. The multiplatform product provides APIs in a variety of languages. It also can manage both Berkeley DB and bdbxml data under the same "container." For the EDS solution, our team focused on the bdyml Java API and XML capabilities. The product leverages the open source Pathan binaries for XPath functionality and the Xerces-C++ binaries for XML parsing capabilities. These libraries provide native-platform speed and are integrated well into the product.

The bdbxml product is open source as well, under a dual-style license. Customers can use it at no charge if the embedding application is open source or used only at a single physical site. Customers that redistribute bdbxml within a non open source product must purchase a commercial software license. The API is...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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