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I liked that video have a look also:

Silicon Valley start-up Ribbit on Monday unveiled a technology platform that will let developers put Web telephony in everything from business software to popular social network sites such as Facebook.

As well as planning to sell its own services directly to consumers in the first quarter, Ribbit said it is working with more than 600 outside developers who are using its technology to create their own voice applications.

Ribbit software serves as an interface between anything from Web sites, e-mail and instant messaging to mobile or regular phones. Developers do not need to be telephony experts to build services with Adobe’s Flash software, which works on most computers.

Have a look at that video cut:

Here are some thoughts:

Using an XML database is reportedly more efficient in terms of conversion costs when you’re constantly sending XML into and retrieving XML out of a database. The rationale is, when XML is the only transport syntax used to get things in and out of the DB, why squeeze everything through a layer of SQL abstraction and all those relational tables, foreign keys, and the like? It basically takes a parsing layer out of the application and brings it into the data engine – where it’s probably going to work faster and more efficiently than the SQL alternative. Probably.

I suspect some of these databases like XIndice, eXist, OZONE etc are perfectly wonderful products. But they haven’t been around so long and don’t elicit the kind of trust (from a jaded old dev like me) as a more legacy product like Oracle, MSSQL, or even MySQL.

I’ve worked with a system where the output of a SQL stored procedure was rendered natively in XML (using a MSSQL db), and I must admit it was quite elegant. Combined with the power of XSLT, the output of a database query can be transformed into anything you may imagine in only a few lines of procedural code (not including the XSLT itself).

I do not think an XML database can replace MySQL. MySQL is excellent at the things SQL does well – relational tables, joins, queries, sorting, indexing, creating paginated tabular rows. an XML database strikes me as a product you’d only use if your needs were a perfect fit, and XML is the only transport method you’ll ever be using.

What can I say… try one of the free ones and see how it goes.

Here some thoughts on XML, I have created a google map for one of my sites which gets the info from an XML file containg about 200 marker locations. This works fine and I’m happy with it.

However, while this information is great to show to consumers, there are a number of competitors out there who would love to get their hands on this data and copy it for use on their own sites. Simply having an XML file stored on my server, and anyone being able to see and download the file feeding the maps, clearly raises a problem.

Is there any way of password protecting an XML file, or somehow encrypting it or something? I just need the file to feed the google map, but not be so easily downloadable as it is right now.

Here’s a snippet from my gmap page, if it helps at all

var request = GXmlHttp.create();
request.open(“GET”, “MY-XML-FILE.xml”, true);
request.onreadystatechange = function() {
if (request.readyState == 4) {
var xmlDoc = request.responseXML;
var markers = xmlDoc.documentElement.getElementsByTagName(“marker”);

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