mr_burns wrote:
Hi there,
Although I have been using XML and RDB in my web applications, I am
still a little unsure about when to use one from the other.
Can anybody please contribute to this when one is more suitable than
the other and the reasons why. Maybe examples of when they have been
used to effect in the past. Cheers
Burnsy
I will take a stab:
For our architecture we have found that DATA es best stored in RDBM, but
the USE of the data in terms of applications is more effective as XML.
Since many of our (government) customers want to expose business
functions as both web pages and as web services, we tend to return XML
from most database functions.
This XML can then be used as output from a web service or (in
conjunction with XSLT) be transformed into xhtml.
Software AG would argue that data would then best be stored in their XML
database, Oracle and others would point out that RDBMS is more effective
and that SQL DML and DDL is standard.
As our conclusion we developed a series of objects that make it,
relatively, easy to handle XML from within a JSP (we do not often use
Servlets, and never EJB).
I once wrote a whole shopping site using XML output from Oracle and a
total of 36 XSL style sheets.
YMMV