I was going to blog some questions about what I am doing today, but I need to build some more experiments first. I am working on dynamic data structure definitions for iCites, and experimenting with alternatives to XML (having priorly found SQL RDBMSs awkward for this particular application over the past decade or so).

I am basically trying to see if storing all of the iCite data in or with dynamically generated classes (possibly script files in BeanShell or modules in Jython) has advantages to storing all of it in XML files.

The main advantage I am looking for is faster and easier object-izing the data for processing, and getting away from doing a lot of processing with XSLT. So, why not store all the data in objects, and then persist them?

This may be futile and silly. Does anyone else create applications that dynamically generate additional script files or modules and execute them? Is that crazy?

I realize one good option to explore, with what I want to do, is dynamic interface proxies and Java byte code manipulation. But, I am not too confident about the ins and outs of this, and also one of my goals is to try to implement this prototype in Java in a manner that can later be done in languages other than Java. Obviously, XML and XSLT has some appeal in this regard.

There are cases where I need XML from the iCite: data interchange and several of the output formats (XHTML, RSS, and FOAF to start with). But, I am thinking that sticking some data from an object into a XHTML, RSS, or FOAF template is going to be more efficient than doing multiple transformations in XSLT. At least, it looks like it is going to be more efficient for me to code at this point ;-)