Re: Gradebook definition - first try

[Duane Morin <dmorin@tiac.net>]

> Also - a question about the XML - is this the primary form in which the
> data will be stored?  How quickly can data in that format be operated
> upon?  Or would the data be in a more database-like format, with the
> option to export as XML?

From my experience, object oriented databases are pretty nasty to work with.
And that's what XML would need, rather than just a standard relational 
database.  Whenever I've worked with XML I've just assumed that it would
remain stored in simple flat files.  But, I've never dealt with a particularly
large dataset.

Good XML parsers will enable you to read/write objects into your XML file, and
then write the file back out, so it appears to the programmer as if it's in 
a database anyway.  The key question is, how efficient is the storage method?
How quickly can the file be read and parsed (or parsed and written)?

Duane