Patent ID: 7165239

Claim:
A software architecture for a distributed computing system implemented at least in part by a computing device, the software architecture comprising: an application configured to handle requests submitted by remote devices over a network; and an application program interface to present functions used by the application to access network and computing resources of the distributed computing system, wherein the application program interface comprises a set of classes that make available standards-based support for processing XML documents, wherein the set of classes are grouped in the application program interface into a plurality of namespaces, and wherein a first of the plurality of namespaces contains classes and enumerations to support XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) and a second of the plurality of namespaces contains an XPath parser and evaluation engine, wherein the set of classes comprises: an XmlReader class that enables non-cached forward only access to XML data; an XPathNavigator class that enables read-only random access to a data store; an XslTransform class that enables transforming of XML data using an XSLT stylesheet; a plurality of Xml Schema classes that enable constructing and editing of schemas; an XmlResolver class that enables resolving of external XML resources named by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI); an XmlDataDocument class that enables structured data to be stored, retrieved, and manipulated though a relational dataset; and an XmlWriter class that enables a non-cached forward only way of generating streams and files containing XML data.