For those who had problems with the 1.2.1 version, we uploaded a slightly updated release, which is now called 1.2.2.
eXist 1.2.1 is mainly a bug fix release, which addresses a number of stability- and performance-critical issues. All releases in the 1.2 series are considered to be stable. They are limited to hand-selected changes, which have been ported from the current development trunk. New features or major code changes will be part of the 1.3 development series.
We nevertheless count more than 60 bug fixes in 1.2.1!
When deploying eXist in a production environment, I really want to make sure that the database is in a consistent state and that potential problems are detected as early as possible. Even if the database is running well, bad things can happen which are outside of eXist's reach (e.g. an OutOfMemory error in the servlet container, which can be fatal).
eXist 1.2.1 will thus offer an automatic consistency and sanity checker. It's main job is to detect inconsistencies or damages in the core database files. This includes the document and collection storage (dom.dbx, collections.dbx) as well as the symbol table (symbols.dbx). While all the indexes can be rebuild after a crash, a corruption in the core files can lead to real data loss.
I have some good news for all users who suffered from eXist generating too many temporary document fragments in the db: the current SVN trunk version doesn't need to store those temp fragments anymore! eXist is finally able to handle in-memory fragments in nearly the same way as persistent documents, which also means: without causing a performance bottleneck.
Google has extended the deadline for student applications until Monday, April 7, 2008. We hope this will convince a few more people to apply. So far we received 6 proposals. However, I think that a detailed application which concentrates on concrete development steps will still have a realistic chance to be accepted.