Sorry to have taken a while to respond. In part that's because what you ask seems like quite a bit of work, and partly because I'm in the middle of working on related things, like installing MySQL (again--the installations never quite seem to "take"), and that can muddy the waters. I find myself wondering if I could give you a better answer after I've made a little progress with MySQL.
Even though I'm moving toward LAMP, my servers are still Windows servers at the moment. There's no ssh in that environment. There's FTP, of course.
The current database is MS Access, which does the job adequately well for the low volume of this site. No SQL dumpfile or anything like the big boys do it.
I can ZIP up the XML files; I do that periodically anyway. It's a couple of hundred megs after zipping. You're right about the XML file documenting the structure (that's why I used XML), and I can email one of those files to you. That might be a better place to start than downloading the entire archive. The XML should be self-explanatory, and I didn't bother with a DTD.
Now, on to matters of codemonkey posturing. Your last couple of paragraphs missed the mark. No veins will pop out when you mention Flex, and in fact I'll raise by referring you to the open-source project OpenLaszlo, which I downloaded a month ago to play with, and over which I'm drooling. Actually, I seem to recall that CarMell was listed as an adopter, so you probably know about OpenLaszlo, and your "Flex" shot assumed I don't. Tsk tsk...
And speaking of dangling things in front of people, I've been drooling even more over OpenMeetings, and thinking about how I could adapt it for use at the Zone...or even as the Zone's interface. OpenMeetings uses OpenLaszlo for the front-end, and the Red5 streaming server on the backend, written in Java and thus requiring TomCat...but that's no problem, because I already have TomCat installed on my servers.
So no, actually, the incantation "Java" doesn't discomfit me at all.