[Pipet Devel] permanent vs. temporary storage WAS about XML

[Jean-Marc Valin]

> I understand your point, and it definately would be possible to keep
> everything in dom and save it when the user chooses save, but there
> are 3 problems:
> 
> 1. XML in dom format can't be parsed using a standard parser, and so
> we always have to use the dom_iterator to iterate through xml. This
> method is *much* slower than parsing with a parser. So I don't think
> we would see a big speed up in everything was in dom.
> 
> 2. There would be no "crash" recovery since everything would be lost
> if Piper crashes (since nothing is stored in the filesystem).
> 
> 3. We would have *a lot* of information in memory all of the time,
> which I don't think would scale well to complex applications/scripts
> with lots of nodes. This could also lead to crazy confusing data
> structures in the code. In addition, this would make debugging the
> thing a serious problem. Right now you can often pick up problems by
> browsing the temporarily stored xml, in this case you would have to
> dumb all kinds of xml to a file and sort through it.

I still prefer seeing XML as a dumb object serializer, as it is in overflow. We
can use it to exchange data or to save it (we can have autosave for crash
recovery), but I wouldn't like the internals of the system to depend on XML.

	Jean-Marc