Oracle Database 10g XML & SQL: Design, Build, & Manage XML Applications in Java, C, C++, & PL/SQL

CHAPTER 19Building an XML-Managed Application

Many software applications, from servers to simple client applications, use configuration files to set up their environment, run-time options, look and feel, and other persisted conditions and options. In the past these files have usually been simply a collection of name-value pairs with specified delimiters. It turns out that this format suffers significant limitations. For example, it is a very fragile format, because misplacement of a single character may invalidate every subsequent entry. Also, there is no random access to this type of format, so if you want a single bit of information, it has to be processed linearly until the data appears. Finally, a flat list of pairs may not be sufficient ...