I am the found of XML Director
Yes, I know (but probably not everyone does ;) Your project is really interesting to follow. And I appreciate your endeavours to support at least two data backends; I think we can all benefit from both adhering to the W3 standards and bringing our approaches closer together.
We currently have a handful of JSON scripts doing basic aggregation for overviews or detail views from within the CMS. Sending JSON back to the CMS is more natural than having to deal with the same information as XML inside the CMS.
I agree. That's what we do in many of our commercial applications as well. In a few cases, we are relying on the default JSON conversions; in most others, we are using XQuery code to prepare XML for a representation that better fits our particular use case.
In an upcoming phase of the project we have more specific and requirements to the XML database and so I am just playing and looking what is doable and how.
Feel free to keep us updated! Christian