CouchDB: Using E4X to get the XML back
Date : 2008 03 05 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianChristopher Lenz has been spending time on the CouchDB project. He got lulled over when CouchDB went to JSON.
He talks about how "CouchDB is pretty well positioned for storing and querying XML data in addition to JSON" via the E4X support that it gets out of the box as it uses SpiderMonkey.
PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:by_lang: function(doc) {
var html = new XML(doc.content);
map(html.@lang, {title: html.head.title.text(), …});
}
To be fair, this is already possible if you use other view servers (such as the Ruby or Python ones), where you also have access to the XML support provided by the respective standard libraries. Given CouchDB’s incremental view update model, you usually don’t care so much about the performance of view functions as you care about the data it produces. So if your view function can somehow parse the XML and put some data into the view index, that's usually all you need. Actually querying the view is going to be really fast.
But E4X is an exceptionally convenient API for XML. I think using E4X is going to be a pretty good approach for those who want to to CouchDB to store and query XML content.