Kimbro Staken's REST/XPath blog

Kimbro Staken's new blog software, built on top of Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, echoes a theme I've been working with myself for a while. A collection of well-formed weblog entries is, implicitly, an XML database whose contents can be searched and intelligently recombined. I've been toying with a simple file-based solution that creates an XPath search interface to my blog content. Kimbro's approach takes the next step:

Now the really interesting feature of this system is that it's really an XML database Web Service. I exposed an XPath query facility through the URL so that the database can be queried via HTTP GET. [Inspirational Technology]

Kimbro gives this example:

http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//a (all links)

But I can change it to, for example:

http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//table[contains(.,'Annie Lennox')] (tables containing 'Annie Lennox')

Very cool! As Kimbro points out:

The possibilities of this are endless, especially as you add more meaningful markup to your posts.
I just love this idea of incorporating XPath into RESTian URLs. With Kimbro's approach, you get immediate use of the markup you create -- just the kind of incentive that's needed.


Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/09/16.html#a797