Re: DSML 2.0 requirements

[Christine Tomlinson <chris.tomlinson@sun.com>]

"Curtin, William" wrote:

> Rob,
>
>   Thanks for summarizing the teleconference. The only other point that I can
> recall was the notion of *physically* extracting the LDAP DIT and treating
> it as an XML document. I think that serious consideration would have to be
> given for any scaling issues associated with this approach.

I agree with your concerns. I think that the general idea of virtualizing
access to one or more LDAP directories via an XML/DOM view need not be taken as
implying or in any sense requiring physical extraction. Note however, that
there is really nothing inappropriate about such extraction any more than there
is in doing a dump to LDIF over LDAP protocol which is done for very large as
well as modest sized directories. Extraction may be achieved trivially by an
XPath that extracts all elements of the DOM view and repeating the contents to
an output form, e.g., DSML 1.0, as in an XSLT stylesheet or other sutiable
templating mechanism.

The real interesting idea here is in a virtual XML document view of a directory
(posibly restricted by ACLs in terms of what is visible, etc.) and what it
implies as far as representing updates, adds, and deletes. This is why I
mentioned a DOM view as an approach since this comes with the idea of an
imperative interface for performing deletes, adds, etc.

ciao,
Christine Tomlinson