[Planner Dev] Re: [Planner] gnome-vfs (WebDAV) support?

[Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>]

On Tue, 2005-08-02 at 10:14 +0100, Bryan Cole wrote:
> Can Planner use gnome-vfs for rw-access to WebDAV shares? It doesn't
> work out-the-box with my binary version, but I could rebuild from source
> if gnome-vfs can be enabled.

Not that I know of, though it would be a cool feature if someone were
inclined to add it.

> Seems to me that multi-user access to planner files is more easily
> implemented using the existing file-format shared over WebDAV than using
> a database backend. In particular, the Subversion revision control
> system can now provide full versioning using standard WebDAV so all
> DAV-enabled office applications can take advantage.

I'm copying the developer list on this - maybe we can get more
discussion on that list.

Sounds like a cool idea.  The reservation I have about implementing
something like this is that once you have all Planner files in a
database, people will want to pose queries against it for reporting
purposes, and those are not likely to be looking for 'diffs' between one
project version and the next, but more likely to be across the project
portfolio - in which case you'd have to pull each project xml and do
some fairly complex coding to get anything of value.

Prepare your overripe produce for launching in my direction now, 'cause
here comes the radical idea.  How about using a Native XML Database
instead?  The idea behind these is that you stuff entire XML documents
into them and they do some technomagic to organize the data into trees
so it becomes much quicker to access than groups of flat files.  

In fact, maybe we should look at using NXDs rather than PostgreSQL &
MySQL as well?  Certainly I'm no expert, but it seems they offer
flexibility to both the user who wants to query them and the developer
who doesn't want to get into a major upgrade struggle every time he
wants to add or change a data element in the xml heirarchy.

Here's a good article:  http://xml.sys-con.com/read/90126_1.htm
It uses Berkeley DB XML (open source) as its example NXD database, and
its very readable for the not-so-technical.

Thought it worth some discussion.

-- 
Kurt Maute <kurt maute us>