XML gateways

[Robert A. (Bob) Morris]

Jim Croft writes:
 > Date:         Wed, 21 Mar 2001 00:25:09 +1100
 > From: Jim Croft <jrc at anbg.gov.au>
 > To: TDWG-SDD at usobi.org
 > Subject:      Re: XML gateways
 >
 > >Virtually all major relational dbms now output XML, if crude, and
 > >there is not really much reason people shouldn't be doing so on some
 > >agreed upon alternative http port, say 8883.
 >
 > I would advise against this... many institutional firewalls prohibit all
 > packets except through port 80... this would effectively prevent all of our
 > staff from playing with the outside world...  bummer, but them's the rules...

Sad, but true. We should kick around other ideas to solve this
problem, though a conventional port may be the easiest for data
sources to implement. How about:

- A convention whereby if
    http://<host>/<filePath>/<cgiquery>
yields HTML then
    http://<host>/<filePath>/xml/<cgiquery>
yields XML

-A convention whereby people set up virtual hosts---pretty easy in
most web servers---so that if
    http://<host>/<filePath>/<cgiquery>
yields HTML then something like
     http://xml-<host>/<filePath>/<cgiquery>
yields XML

Hopefully all of this is temporary, since a well crafted GBIF should
provide for discovery of URL, query syntax, and return schema. My real
point is that current versions of Oracle, SQL-Server, FileMaker, and
Access(?) can already emit XML without much(?) effort on the part of
the data source operators, and doing so would let people proceed to
build interesting distributed applications.

>...