Bowerbird Computing today
released XDBM, a free, embedded database designed specifically to handle
XML.
XDBM is an XML database manager that developers can include in their own
software. It is designed to allow individual programs to more easily use
the XML files that they produce.
XDBM’s database design gives it a major advantage over the other options
available to programmers who want to make their program XML aware. Other
programs frequently: are slow because they need to read the entire file to
find out what it contains; do not enable XML files to be searched; and
consume a great deal of memory because they need to load every required part
of the file from the start.
XDBM attempts to overcome these shortcomings by:
- Storing the XML in a preparsed format so programs do not need to
read the entire file - Storing linked lists in the file to allow fast and easy searching of the
XML graph - Using search functions to enable users to load parts of the XML file on
demand
XDBM is a cooperative effort between Bowerbird Computing and the open
source community. Bowerbird Computing does the marketing and management of
XDBM, and pays royalties to software developers who contribute time, code
or support services to the project.
XDBM can be downloaded from
Bowerbird Computing’s site. Versions for both Linux and Win32 are
available.
The XDBM API is also based on the DOM standard.
Bowerbird’s other two products are also open source. FreeDOM is a
set of DOM-compliant interfaces to XDBM that can be used with various
object-oriented programming languages, and libunicode is a set of
string handling functions for Unicode, charset converters and modes for
various editors.