Re: [bdbxml] Developing a local (Swing) front-end

Mark, Tom, Breno, et. al.,

     This topic is near and dear to my heart.  Thanks for giving me  
the opportunity to chat about it with you.  Berkeley DB XML is the  
only Sleepycat product that could potentially have a very nice GUI  
tool.  DB and JE could both have management tools, don't get me  
wrong, but of our three products BDB XML is clearly the one begging  
for such a thing.

     That said, we currently have no plans to develop one.  But, as  
always, I'm looking around for suggestions and ideas about what such  
a tool might look like, what it might do, and what kind of impact it  
may or may not have on our ability to service the NXD market.

     So, my thinking to date has led me to believe that an Eclipse  
based plug-in would be ideal.  Something that allowed for the  
introspection, manipulation, and management of containers and their  
environment.  Something that helped form valid and efficient XQuery  
statements, something that might even display query plans in some  
intuitive way (colored the query so that hot spots were red or some  
such thing), and other fun things.

     Let me start off by saying that its not my intention to try to  
compete with the tool vendors in this market.  Stylus Studio and BDB  
XML have a happy marriage, I'd like to keep it that way.  There is,  
however, room for us to do some GUI tool to help our developers  
along.  This is especially true given the relative youth of the  
XQuery standard when compared to SQL or other database query  
languages.  We recognize that, it is hard to understand how queries  
will behave inside our optimizer, that process should be more  
transparent.

     Also, don't let this slow anyone else from building their own.   
Like I said, we currently don't have plans or resources to build such  
a thing.  Right now, I'm just exploring the possibilities.

     If you would like to brainstorm, I'll take notes.  I'd also like  
good feedback on how much this type of tool would impact our ability  
to sell the product.  We have to keep the lights on too.

regards, and thanks for any and all help,

-greg

_____________________________________________________________________

Gregory Burd
Product Manager                         [email protected]
Sleepycat Software, Inc.                http://www.sleepycat.com/



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