So, you might be wondering what's going on with the project, since my last post almost two weeks ago. Not all that much.
I've decided to think and write an actual document before implementing anything, but I do know the design will change during implementation, as my understanding of the problems and the tools gets better. I just didn't want to start coding before I was sure I knew what I wanted to code. So I have the introduction written. It's more Rationale than Requirements or Specifications (the Design part is not even started). It's a bit too formal for a personal post and a bit too personal for a formal document. I can't quite feel the reader.
Instead of doing my Passover homework (reading by all accounts an excellent book) I'm reading up on Web Services (beyond the buzzword).
I'm having a very difficult time deciding on the right technological approach: the API is in XML since I see my data best in XML form and the existing tools are indispensable in processing for presentation and achieving interoperability. But I don’t know of any good free (at least as beer if not speech) XML database, and anyway I think I can better tune a relational one. But of course, mapping XML into a relational database might be bad for both performance and maintainability. Also, I think Python is cooler than Java, but the benchmarks definitely favor the statically typed language. And of course, PHP is the popular choice, but it always felt like a giant kludge to me, and its latest attempts to imitate Java only serve to point me to the real thing.
One thing I can tell you right away: dotNet is not even considered, because I’m biased.
