[JDEV] why?

[Max Horn]

At 17:56 Uhr -0700 19.04.2001, Greg Hookey wrote:
>Good day,
>	I've been looking over your IM system for a while now and I 
>am wondering
>why you have made certain design decisions.
>
>1)  XML....it's new...it's usefull in some situations, but not this one.
>     Why did you choose it.  It's makes now sense.  You made your configuration
>	files way too complex.  You've used it as your user database in which a
>	file per user is in no fashion scalable and makes your IM system
>	rediculously slow.  XML has no place here.  Especially in a 
>file per user
>	situation.
>
>2)  Why in your new CVS version, try to solve this problem by substituting
>     a relation database for a file system.  You must realize that this idea
>	is plain rediculous and does not solve the problem of parsing 
>an XML file
>	per user when this should be realistically a database of such 
>information.


Several other people already explained why XML is not a bad choice, 
and I fulyl agree. The only valid point I see in your mail is the 
complaint about the user db done on  a one-file-per-uers basis. 
However, this is just a simple default implementation, done this way 
because it was very cheap to implement.

If you inform yourself a bit, you will find out that the user db is 
actually done in a quite powerful way: there is a generic interface 
called xdb which allows you to basically plugin any user storage. 
There are XDB backends for LDAP, ODBC and MySQL, and you can easily 
write your own. This is much more flexible, as many users (esp. the 
"big" ones) already have existing user DBs, and want to use those. No 
need to sync two DBs this way, just use one for everything!



Max
-- 
-----------------------------------------------
Max Horn
C++/ObjC/Java Developer

email: <mailto:max at quendi.de>
phone: (+49) 6151-494890