X-Hive Corporation has announced X-Hive/DB 1.1, a persistent DOM implementation built on top of the Objectivity object oriented database.

Jeroen van Rotterdam explained the rationale for X-Hive's implementing a persistent DOM:  

Within an XML programming environment the DOM is an obvious choice due to the fact that it is the only interface that is a W3C recommendation. Building applications against a persistent DOM is exactly the same effort as programming against an in memory DOM.

DOM support is layered on top of a more complex internal data model:

Besides all the query facilities etc X-Hive is a persistent DOM. We don't expose a generic OODBMS, and for optimization purposes the data model behind the DOM interfaces is more complex than what DOM offers. As an X-Hive customer you wouldn't see the underlying object persistent model.

The press release elaborates on the support of W3C standards, noting that this approach allows seamless integration with third-party tools:

X-Hive Corporation's commitment to the use of W3C standards was instrumental in fulfilling demand for third-party software tools by bringing these integrations to market within a very short timeframe.

In addition to DOM, X-Hive is also supporting XPath, XLink, XPointer and XSLT.