Non-Geeks Keep Out • 21 March 2007 • The SnowBlog

Non-Geeks Keep Out

          Seriously, there's not much point in you reading this unless you have mastery over most things electronic. I want to ask the SnowBlog readership for help (assuming there really is a SnowBlog readership) but just reading the question will give you a nose bleed if you're at all prone to technophobia.

But if you believe your kung fu is strong enough, please read on... So I'm working on a project involving Onix messages. I want to store a big bunch of them in a database and then let users fetch them out, edit them, create new ones, and save them back to the database using a web interface. I'm using JavaServer Faces, writing my code in the Sun Creator environment, and all that side of things is going swimmingly - though I'm only doing it to a proof-of-concept level at the moment. I'll probably use Sun's Application Server to host the thing too, because it makes my life so easy. I'm just starting to think about what the database design should look like and I'm very aware that someone else must have done this first. The couple of Onix-y apps I'm aware of both use FileMaker. But I want to go with something SQL-compliant. I'm using MySQL at the moment, which I'll stick with unless there's a good reason not to. Has someone already got a schema that maps db tables to the Onix message structure? Or heard rumours of such a thing? I'd even be lured into using an XML database (preferably an open-source one) if someone has already got something working with Onix. I mean, ideally I'd also like someone to send me some nice abstraction/interface code that loads a message into a DOM and lets me use XPath and XSL to work on it, but a proven database design would be a good start.

So any thoughts? Anyone? Bueller? Anyone? 
Rob