The slides from the eXist users meeting during XML Prague are finally available. Thanks to all who helped to organize this meeting. It was a great experience and very inspiring.
As nearly every year, parts of the eXist team are planning to attend (XML Prague). This is certainly our favorite conference and we have used the event during the past years to meet, discuss, plan and spend some time together. It's a rather small (and affordable) conference, but you'll see all the important XML geeks hanging around there ;-) XML Prague will be even earlier this year (March 13/14).
We currently plan to organize an "eXist users group" meeting on the Friday before the main conference starts. The program will depend on the audience, so we'll need your feedback. It may just be a more or less informal meeting or we could extend it into a workshop and provide some hands-on experience.
If you plan to be at XML Prague and you are interested, please send me (wolfgang AT exist-db DOT org) an email with some details. In particular, we need to know:
- if and at what time we could meet at the Friday (whole day, afternoon, late afternoon)
- what your interests are: exchange ideas with other users or get some information/training on a particular topic
- if you would like to present something to the users group, e.g. an application which is based on eXist or a development project you are working on
eXist is the subject of FLOSS Weekly episode 97. Wolfgang had the pleasure to be interview by Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte during their show last week:
You can also view a recording of the live video.
The eXist interview starts at about 12m:07s into the audio podcast.
NEW: A transcript of the interview is now available. It was prepared by members of the eXist user community.
After another 2 months of hard work or 412 revisions later, we are proud to release eXist 1.4 (codename: Eindhoven) today. Changes since the release candidate include some performance-critical fixes to the collection and nodes caching, as well as improvements in the Lucene index and other extension modules. Based on user feedback, the URL rewriting and MVC framework has been extended to adopt it to more complex real-world scenarios. Examples and documentation have been greatly enhanced.
The release also features experimental support for server-side debugging of XQuery scripts based on the dbgp protocol. The debugger is still a bit limited on the client side (we used emacs and vi since they already implement dbgp), but otherwise usable. We're looking forward to provide a complete implementation in 1.4.1 and would like encourage users to help us testing in the meantime.
For the main features of 1.4, please refer to the previous release note or the press summary.
We would like to thank all committers and users who made this possible. In particular, we had lots of people testing the release, checking the documentation or suggesting fixes. Thanks for your contribution!
We highly recommend that users of 1.2 upgrade to 1.4 after they have tested this release. In 1.4, eXist’s XQuery engine has been redesigned to improve the processing of queries against in-memory documents. This has been causing many issues on 1.2.
We are happy to announce a release candidate for eXist version 1.4 is now available for download. The final release should follow soon after, and will supersede the current 1.2 series as the stable branch.
Among many other things, the 1.4 release features:
- Faster, feature rich full text indexing. This is based on Apache Lucene which has been transparently integrated into the XQuery engine and works well with other modules in eXist, e.g. match highlighting and KWIC display.
- Lightweight URL rewriting and MVC framework.
- Basic document versioning toolbox.
- Improved XML validation and catalog management.
- Documentation - many improvements and additions, including better XQuery function documentation.
However, the most important change of this release is behind the scenes – eXist’s XQuery engine has been redesigned to improve the processing of queries against in-memory documents. This has been the major bottleneck of the 1.2.x series; Experience shows that many applications will benefit from the newly redesigned core. Additionally there have been many small optimizations to the query engine, thus enabling eXist to further optimise its use of indexes or avoid unnecessary steps when evaluating positional predicates.
Please have a look at the Upgrade Guide before installing the new version. N.B. –Several important default settings have changed!