Here is the scenario … We have a custom CMS built by a 3rd party … We dont have direct access to the DB but the content can be exported to an XML file or accessed via API calls.
I need to build a micro site and I want to know which is better (overall) … To build the site using the XML with all of the stories (less than 700Kb) and having to parse it when I need to display the news list (title, excerpt, date, byline) and then again when a user wants to see the complete story…. Or make individual calls via an API that gives me the story list in one call and the story in another call (via the story id).
Which is best? I see two things happening here. The XML file needs to be updated with a separate process when new content is added. That is automatically pulled with the API approach. However, using an XML has its benefits because I can use a caching system to serve the file from memory. I can also cache API calls to benefit from recurrent request to the API.
What are your thoughts in this? What do you suggest?
If the API returns sufficient information for your needs, that would be recommended over using XML as a data store which is likely a bad idea in terms of performance.
If the file is not too huge and you read more than write you could also choose to use var_export to store your data as native PHP data structure.