XRX/Benefits of XRX

Benefits of XRX Architecture
XRX benefits from each of its three underlying standards:


 * XForms
 * Unlike technologies such as AJAX, XRX assumes a model-view-controller architecture
 * XForms supports a dependency graph that allows the right views to be automatically updated
 * All interactions between the client and the server are sent through the model via submission elements
 * REST
 * XRX takes advantage of web infrastructure such as multi-level caching and technologies that are collectively known as deep REST systems.
 * XQuery
 * XQuery is a functional XML-oriented query and transform language that can perform the business logic for many systems. In addition to its XML transform capabilities, it has advantages over older query languages such as SQL designed in the 1970s and 1980s.  XQuery has the expressive power of SQL (joins etc) and can also manipulate recursive hierarchical data structures.  Unlike SQL, XQuery is a W3C standard with very strong standardization across vendors and over 14,000 tests to ensure cross vendor compatibility.  Developers frequently develop XQuery applications on low-cost OpenSource databases and port them to commercial systems without significant changes.

Together, these three standards allow developers to use a single data format (XML) on the client, middle tier and the databases server. This means there is no translation of the data formats between layers. In contrast to this, many other modern systems communicate using XML, process business logic in an object-oriented layer, store data in a relational database, and render a GUI as HTML.

Consider all the "glue" code in a typical modern system, which serves no purpose other than to translate from one representation to another: object-relational mappings, HTML rendering code, XML import/export code. These web application architectures take HTML forms (which use flat key-value pairs), convert these data structures to middle tier objects such as Java or .Net and then transform the objects into tabular data streams so they can be stored in relational databases. Once in the relational database the data must then be re-serialized by doing SELECT statements, converted into objects and the objects then converted back into HTML forms. This is a four-step translation architecture.

In contrast, XRX uses a zero-translation architecture. Zero translation implies that XML is stored in the web client, transmitted to a middle tier validation rules engine in XML and then stored in its entirety in an XML database. Typically, XML is also the format that data is delivered or streamed in from other systems. The storage as XML is also known as a zero-shredding process since the data files are not separated into Third Normal Form (3NF) data structures.

This relational (3NF) storage is often not helpful. XML data has the relationships built into the data, whereas relational data is stored in "dumb" tables and allows/requires the applications to specify the relationships. For applications where the relationships are well known (e.g. a user has a collection of blog posts, and those posts have collections of comments and replies) XML is better. When a "data warehouse" is needed and the relationships will vary widely based on the calling application, a relational store may be better because RDBs are optimized for ad-hoc joins where XML DBs are generally not. (e.g. a group of users are in a social network and there are a variety of ad-hoc relationships that *all* must be queried quickly - use an RDB). XML databases are optimized for the relationships built into the XML, relational databases are optimized for easy programming and performance on one preferred set of relationships.

The biggest difference, though, is zero-translation vs. "translation everywhere."

1+1+1=10
Using a combination of all these three standards gives web developers a tenfold increase in productivity.

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