I'm currently doing research on how to store XML with object-oriented means. It's of course rather trivial to store XML somehow. The interesting question is which system makes most sense if the XML is to be queried using XPath or XQuery expressions. <!--more--> Just to write down some of the ideas:

• Standard DOM - not really efficient because of the awful lot of pointers. If one element is changed, lots of others have to be updated too
• AST/TA developed at the Humbold University in Berlin - interprete XML Nodes as a tree-structured index above a simple text array with the contents of the XML file. This can probably be implemented quite efficient using a double-linked list of strings or whatever.
  Might be useful if your XML application is very text-centered, e.g. true XHTML files where the Markup can be considered eye-candy.
• eXist style with pseudo nodes inflating every partial tree to be symmetric. This makes sibling questions very easy, but on every update a full rebuilding of the tree is necessary.

Also a lazy update of pointer lists might be nice. Every XML node keeps a list of pointers to the nodes on its axis like siblings, predecessors, children, successors etc. which is kind of virtual. It's only created when needed and updated if certain timestamps (which have to be somehow kept in the data dictionary) are updated.

I found this article comparing C# with Java in the Gentoo forums. It promises to be quite interesting though I didn't have the time to read it yet - I should read it tomorrow.

I have visited a lecture called DISCOURSE which is sponsored by Microsoft and aims at promoting the .NET framework. It was quite interesting and a friend of mine, Lars Trieloff, and me wrote a sample C# .NET application for the University afterwards.

It's a Visual Tail -f using .NET. The application core (I know it's ridiculous to use that term in conjunction with about 2500 LOC) is portable in terms of running under MS .NET as well as Mono. We also have GUIs for both Windows.Forms and GTK#.

I wonder if it might be of any use except to us for learning the language (and getting some ECTS credits at the Uni). At least the syslog tool included in GNOME seems to suck, it doesn't support reading from e.g. a remote SSH session or a sudo.

Well, finally I have managed to create me a weblog. Maybe it's of some use, otherwise I have at least learned how to do this ;-)