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Tanveer
Patel
Profile:
Architecture Design, metalayer 1.0
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Why did you choose XML(eXtensible markup language)as the formative
technology for metalayer?
Human communication and sharing is not structured. For a co-creation
and collaboration tool like metalayer, it is essential to have technology,
which can cope with and adapt to the unstructured and chaotic ways
of creative communication. XML supports semi-structured information
in a very natural way and allows a very high degree of personalization.
Why
has metalayer decided to provide the solution, besides Microsoft.NET,
on a Java - Linux platform?
The platform doesn't matter so much, as most of the technology used
for metalayer 1.0 is platform-independent XML, XSLT, HTML and JavaScript.
Technically, both the platforms are comparable. Interesting for
me is the open source philosophy of Java-Linux. It added a lot of
good tools, knowledge and ultimately ideas into the metalayer development
team to develop within the Java/Linux community.
Are
there any shortcomings of not having a relational database?
Well,
performance of loading - but this is only a shortcoming, until the
metalayer internal cache is built up - so, for the first two minutes
after a server start up only. Afterwards, 99% of the objects are
loaded from the cache, and the back-end doesn't play any role. Database
makes sense if you have a fixed pattern to proceed, defined steps
like in a structured Application. There are a couple of good tools
and features in a relational database, related to Indexing and Security,
but if you analyze metalayer's requirement and architecture, then
you see, that we don't need most of these tools. And there is always
an overhead of connection and additional complexity in the way how
different RDBs react differently, with the same query, which makes
an XML approach much more appropriate in our architecture. Using
XML, with our own cache and security layer makes metalayer independent
of the platform and background structures.
What
exactly are the benefits of having an object oriented approach to
metalayer?
Everything
within the metalayer platform is a metalayer object. Every Message,
File, Meeting, News, Session and Agenda is a metalayer object. A
metalayer object is a "living" piece of XML - and not the same as
a Java or C# objects (even though one metalayer object 'lives' within
the layer as a Java or C# object) - This object orientation preserve
the individuality down to the very basic element of conversation.
This architecture also allows us to add any new features by plugging
in new objects into the platform - it's really that simple!
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