Content Request Markup Language (CRML): A Distributed Framework for XML-Based Content Publishing

Abstract

Construct web applications to provide dynamic, personalized web contents with high scalability and performance is a challenge to the software industry in the next century. In most available solutions, load balancing and caching mechanisms are introduced in front of web servers to reduce workload. In this paper we present Content Request Markup Language (CRML), an enabling technique for distributed XML processing at the content level. CRML is a language based on emerging XML standards, XSLT and XPATH, to publish XML-based content over HTTP protocol. It provides hints to construct a distributed framework to support parallel XML-based content publishing. In addition, the content from databases or other sources could be cached before or after processing in block or page level. With the parallel content publishing and the caching mechanism, the CRML could provide a high performance platform for fully customized web service.