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IBM Developerworks today has an article on "Making Dashboards with XQuery".

It uses eXist and provides a nice example of how to access external website data to create a mashup in XQuery. Source code is available as a starting point for your own experiments, though it is not optimized for speed in any way. Note: you may want to test this with eXist trunk, not 1.2.5 (processing in-memory fragments works much faster with trunk).

P.S.: also check Chris Wallace's article on "Dashboards and Widgets in XQuery"

We are happy to announce that eXist 1.2.5 is now available for download. Like all releases in the 1.2.x series, version 1.2.5 is a bug fix and stability release. It only contains hand-selected changes, which have been tested in production. Updating is recommended.

The 1.2.5 release addresses a number of major problems and deficiencies. These include, among other things:

• attribute values larger than 4K could lead to index failures
• concurrency issues/access conflicts caused queries to fail unpredictably and sometimes damaged the db
• xmlrpc interface was responsible for memory issues and limited parallel connections; major update of the xmlrpc libs and interfaces
• bugs in crash recovery; improved shutdown/startup process to avoid unnecessary, sometimes fatal recovery runs
• new web interface for monitoring queries/running operations
• updated SOAP libraries to fix memory issues

We would now like to finalize 1.3, which will be based on the current SVN trunk. However, I will continue to maintain the 1.2.x branch, so it is possible that there will be a 1.2.6 release in addition to 1.3.

Special thanks to Dannes who spent a weekend with me (Wolfgang) to get the release ready.

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.