"Ted Byers" writes:
When I cook, I tend to wash my hands repeatedly, every time I handle a
different food; especially meats. And I clean my work area thoroughly when

And what do you do when you are handling a dough? You can't keep
washing your hands every time you touch it, can you?

Alas, I don't do much cooking any more because I like things a little
diverse and interesting but my sister and neice and nephew prefer things I
find bland and won't eat the kinds of things I'd prepare (if I made a meat
sauce for pasta, they won't eat it if I put in garlic or chili or cumin or
mushrooms or beans or onion ...). :-( And I can't be bothered just for
me.

Not even onions? You _are_ in trouble.

The single biggest benefit of my product is that it does a thorough analysis
of the ingredients of a recipe (including especially quantities) in order to
estimate the nutritional properties of the recipe (e.g. calories, fats,
protein, carbohydrates, sodium, &c.) and supports the entry of limits on
nutrient intake (e.g. at least so many grams/day but not more than this
number of grams/day) and food allergies.

I can't see why I need this function, but I may of course be wrong. I
eat more or less whatever I want. Luckily, I am fond of healthy
food. If I had liked chips, french fries or other fatty foods, I would
be in trouble.

I had thought of using XML, but I post-poned that since I didn't want to
take the time to develop fully fledged XML parsing code. XML is easy,
almost as easy as basic HTML, but the code to manage it isn't.

This is why people use things like xerces, xalan, xpath and the
like. You do _not_ want to write your own parser. I like the ability
to be able to say "give me the nodes that has a "keywords" element
attached containing a "keyword" element with the word "indian" in it".

There are no production-quality (as I define production-quality) free
as in beer XML databases out there yet. This is probably the biggest
problem to my solution. Xindice is getting close. Hibernate may help
out, though, but I would think there is a need to serialize the xml to
text for storage. I haven't tried yet. YMMV.

My opinions may be skewed. We are an all-objects, all-xml shop.

Geir