How would you consume fairly large xml data (contains geospatial information) that you wanted to re-serve as a map service to/through the Flex Viewer?
My initial reaction would be to write a scheduled python script which reads the xml using available xml libraries, output to shapefile and make a map service consuming the shapefile, which I have done before; however, the max field attribute length is much to short to use shapefile. Unless there is a way I do not know, File geodatabase using ArcPy cursors is out because the map service would just lock the database so I could not update it. I could convert the data to kml either by xslt translation or by writing a script, but ESRI uses a utility server on their end to parse kml for the flex viewer which would not work for any server behind firewalls. I could write a script to convert it to JSON but I don't know of any available widgets that could consume it. I see there is a new GeoEvent server extension, but with our budget cut so much each year, there is no way we will be getting it, nor would I want to for something that should be basic (after all, Google Earth handles live feeds just fine with just a simple xml file (kml is xml)).
Does anybody know of any good examples of widgets that consume data from either a non-spatially enabled database like SQL server (I could write a .NET backend service if necessary to get it from the database to Flex), or JSON, or straight xml? I imagine a script that updates SDE could do it, but I do not really want to go that route since it requires an ArcEditor or ArcInfo Desktop license on the server being wasted.
Thanks for any and all ideas!!!