Architectural question

[barrywood]

I'm getting ready to start on a fairly large project and I'm not quite sure which approach I should be taking. This is going to be a music library site where a music supervisor would log in and browse the available songs using different criterial to filter the list. Right now the data is in the iTunes XML file and will probably remain there as the master offline copy to be maintained.

 

The way I see it I've got three options for how to approach the site:

 

PHP page reads and processes XML file

Each time the visitor chooses criteria and hits the "display" button a new PHP page is requested. The page will loads the XML file, do the filtering, and present the results.

 

XML file loaded into MySQL database

A one-time processing of the XML is done to populate a MySQL database. Then each page load would use the criteria to form a query and the page will display the results.

 

jQuery reads and processes XML file

A "one-page" solution where the XML file is loaded by jQuery and the page is dynamically re-rendered by the visitors browser when new criteria is applied.

 

My main concern is client-side experience. I don't have to worry much about server load or scaling because there will only be a handful of people accessing the site at any given time. I do however want to make this as snappy as possible.

 

This XML file is likely to be 2-3 MB so I'm a little wary of loading the file at each page load.

 

I'd love to get input from anyone who's done anything like this in the past.

 

[corbin]

Loading it into the database would probably be more efficient.