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

[J.W. Bizzaro]

Brad Chapman wrote:
> 
> 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.

Well, you know more about DOM.  I'll leave it up to you.  I was just
suggesting the use of some sort of temporary storage until "save" is selected
by the user.

> 2. There would be no "crash" recovery since everything would be lost
> if Piper crashes (since nothing is stored in the filesystem).

Between saves, even a word processor would loose info.

> 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.

That's why I like XML :-)

Jeff
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                      |           J.W. Bizzaro           |
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                      | http://bioinformatics.org/~jeff/ |
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                      |        BIOINFORMATICS.ORG        |
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