Hola,
I'm piecing together the best way to approach a rather large project (for me at least). The pieces are:
several databases scattered across the planet available through various web servers plus a mysql database under my control
data (format TBD) that is a mixture of relatively static (definitions or terms and phrases; names and addresses; and how tos), and dynamic (news and calendar info plus discussion lists)
Would like to make all data shareable between the websites.
Data searches must be quick and provide on-topic results.
And a programmer experienced with PHP and MySQL (me).
This sounded like a job for XML!
First issue: My current line of thinking is that since these are independent DBs on a variety of platforms I need to use either XML-RPC, SOAP, or WDDX but I'm not sure which one.
Second issue: I want to categorize the data regardless of where it is. I plan to build my own XML schema to describe the data. I can see how to handle this with the static data since it will be hosted on my web server. But how do I handle the dynamic data scattered across several web servers? Do I build somesort of metadata structure to describe the data and where it can be found?
Third issue: The News, Calendar, and Discussion lists seem to fit well within the scheme of RDF/RSS (yes?). I write the code and distribute it to anyone who wants it and they will have access to my info. But should that info come from my MySQL db directly or do I dump the db to a well-formed XML document and use that instead?
Any insight you provide would be most appreciated and yes, I'm on the edge of my knowledge here so feel free to enlighten me.
