Seeking creative XML locking solutions

Seeking creative XML locking solutions

Nascent content management system seeks ideas for ways to lock whole parts or fragments of XML document.

Here’s the problem I’ve got. I have XML files holding everything on my site. This is great because I can do anything I want as far as rendering them. The problem I’m running into is that updating those XML files is very tricky. An example of that trickiness is in something as simple as blogchecker. I have a list of URLs that get checked by blogchecker. This check takes about 3-5 minutes to run and at the end of it blogchecker updates the XML file with new information. I’d like to be able to modify the file in the middle of blogchecking, or at the very least have a clean way of locking individual pieces of it. If I modify the file while blogchecker is running my changes will be lost when blogchecker finishes and rebuilds the XML file as it last understood it.

The first person that says use a SQL database with transactions and generate XML files out of it has to sit in the corner for an hour. In my opinion, that is missing some of the fundamental advantages of working with XML, namely working with data using a document centric metaphor instead of the old relational table model. I don’t have anything against databases, in fact I think that things like dbXML might just be the answer I’m looking for.