12.4. Design Choices

While designing OAI, we made a number of decisions that impacted the overall architecture of the system. To comply with the requirement of having to support multiple heterogeneous clients, we chose to use XML as the data transport for exchanging data between the client and the OAI system. This design choice introduced a number of issues on how to deal with the data requests to OAI that arrive in the form of XML documents and how to return data also in the form of XML documents in an efficient way. In this section, we discuss in detail each of the choices we made including the available options in each case, the advantages and disadvantages of each option, and the reason for our final selection.

12.4.1. Using XML in OAI

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