One of the things I love about reading Jon Udell's blog is that Jon is a "cool stuff" magnet. Such is the case today where Jon reports on Kimbro Staken's new blog software, built on top of Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML. In Kimbro's system, the XPATH query on the XML data just becomes part of the URL and thus is folded right into the GET. As Jon says: "I just love this idea of incorporating XPath into RESTian URLs." There's something elegant about it.

Every once in a while I make a change to my CSS that allows my posts to have more meaningful mark-up. For example, I created a class for quotes so that it would be easier to find them. Still, I think there's much more to do in this area to make my blog a more meaningful data repository for myself and others. Using an XML based data base as the heart of the content management system would provide the infrastructure for doing this (although making it reality would still require discipline).

The other part of this post that's very interesting to me is the link to Berkeley DB XML. I'd heard of it before, but never looked into it. If you've ever thought about building an application that's based on XML, you know how key an XML based DB is to the whole thing. Berkeley DB XML is an open source XML database built on top of Berkeley DB. (People who know the history of iMALL are chuckling right now.) I found a good little article on Berkeley DB XML that contains PERL code showing how it can be used. Summary: supports XPATH queries, but not updates---yet. Imagine being able to GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE to an XML database in a RESTian manner.