Come on guys.... no one knows anything about this?

In OpenEdit we store data all kinds of ways; XML, Hibernate, Lucene, Cumulus, CSV, JDBC, DB4O and we have a pluggable database feature as well - so we don't discount databases for those who want them. What we have found is the most tedious and time consuming way is relational databases. XML is always the easiest.

It seems that in the 80's and 90's relational databases helped a business pull together their data into one place. You could cross reference everything within one company on one server. But now we are building web applications. There are now MANY servers. Each business has it's own web sites and there are no fixed relationships and no data integrity among web sites. If a record is missing then just show an error. If an error occurs on a web form we don't rollback. We let them try again. We don't want the  transaction canceled from Amazon.com if we type in a bad credit card number.

We sometimes work on a large database applications for a fortune 50 companies. We spent 60% of our time doing import/export from mainframe/SQL data into lots of DB tables. We have to get everything approved with the DBA. Have to have transactions, hundreds of fields, 3rd normal form, lots of tables everyplace. But the customers could care less about our 3rd normal form. What real customers really always want to know is how does the user Interface work? How friendly is it? Can it tie into my other systems on other servers?

We should work on the user interface and not pay so much attention to the data. Most data in a database in temporary anyways. After two years most people want to archive off the old data from the database. Databases are old news.

thank you for the reply.

 So you would give XML based platform a resounding yes, correct?

Here is the thing. We have a larger organization that was is using an unstable version of CMS...which created files with .xml extensions. Now we are thinking about dumping the unstable CMS and get something better. The problem is that the group can't seem to agree on whether to make XML a requirement or not. 

 Any additional input would be great.

Thanks again.

 Ceci. 

Yes I would - based on OpenEdit's results and our customer satisfaction.

OpenEdit is used by corporate marketing departments and firms to manage all of their marketing needs, whether that be web content, digital assets including video and music, social networking tools, what have you. Most of these are complex  global, enterprise installations running OpenEdit successfully.

One brief description (cause it is fun to brag about a bit!), we have a Fortune 100 company in the US using OpenEdit for their CMS and DAM solution. They use OpenEdit and its built-in features to manage and update their web content for numerous websites globally, in fact they manage all of their digital content using OpenEdit.

They also use OpenEdit's DAM features in their production departments in USA, India and UK - they have 2,000+ production employees keywording, uploading and downloading assets for their print materials with OpenEdit.

All of this is done with XML - However, because we do have clients who require databases to be used for many different reasons, OpenEdit has a database feature for those who require it.

Julie 

For web pages, xhtml is the ideal format.  A good WYSIWYG editor will save data in this format.  XHTML allows the data to be processed using XSLT a powerful XML presentation layer. 

For a web page, it is very rare to need pure xml data.  Things like news feeds are typically stored in the database and if a news feed or other integration is necessary the data will be exported as XML.

Solutions like INGENIUX are the type of product that look good on paper but don't work in the real world.

Have a look at our product, it is LAMP based with XHML content and XSLT templates.  Migration to this stystem should not be that difficult.

www.aspirecms.com