Ever fancied adding a Captcha to your eXist Web Application?
reCaptcha makes it very easy to add a Captcha system to any application and by using reCaptcha you will be supporting a good cause - digitizing books.
With reCaptcha and a little bit of XQuery we can easily setup a working Captcha system. I have written a reCaptcha XQuery module that you anyone may use...
Joe Wicentowski has added another excellent tutorial to the XQuery wikibook. It shows how to develop a keyword search on multiple document types and how to display search results with highlighted keywords in context (KWIC).
In particular the KWIC display should be interesting. It is based on XQuery code originally developed for the documentation search facility on the main eXist page and the wiki (see "Quick Search" box to the right). Contrary to earlier solutions, we no longer need complicated callback functions to extract the matches with surrounding text. Instead, all the processing is done in XQuery. This became possible thanks to recent improvements in the query engine (that's why you need an eXist version build from SVN).
Joe's tutorial guides you through a complete example. The XQuery wikibook is a great resource for XQuery in general. Don't miss it.
There have been some major changes to the general setup of eXist's web application in the current SVN trunk. Access to the documentation and most of the XQuery examples is no longer going through Cocoon. The Cocoon pipelines have been replaced by a single controller XQuery, which handles all the request routing and output transformations. This doesn't mean we are dropping support for Cocoon. We just think that separating the Cocoon-dependant features from the eXist-only stuff will help new users to get an easier start with eXist. Advanced users can always check out the eXist-as-Cocoon-block distribution to have all features available.
The current SVN trunk version of eXist features a new full text indexing module which could be the foundation for a faster, better configurable and feature rich alternative to eXist's builtin full text index. The new search facility in AtomicWiki (check the Quick Search box to the right) is based on it, so you can immediately see the index in action by executing a search here.
Eclipse is one of the most popular development platforms. Because of that we were looking for a way to access the eXist database directly from Eclipse in a convenient way. The result of our thoughts is the eXist Eclipse Plugin.