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.
eXist is participating in the Google Summer of Code again. Student applications can be submitted until March 26! The list of proposals along with the timeline can be found here:
Some of our project proposals may sound a bit ambiguous, but please don't be scared: we are here to help ;-) We chose those projects because they represent more or less separate work packages which can be handled without knowing the entire eXist code base.
The list includes, for example, a "remote debugging interface" for XQuery. We certainly don't expect someone to write a full-blown debugger. What we need is a well-defined debugging interface on the server and a simple command-line prototype, which demonstrates the interface.
Or take "index-support for order-by, distinct-values and aggregate functions": eXist's new indexing architecture makes it possible to implement the required functionality as an index plugin. Not too difficult. The challenge though will be to make it efficient.
I have not been there myself, but as we heard from those who attended XML 2007, there were quite a few talks mentioning eXist:
Erik Bruchez: XForms and the eXist XML database: a perfect couple
Dan McCreary: Using XForms and eXist to Manage Metadata
Kurt Cagle: Lightweight XML
Mark Birbeck: XForms, XHTML, and RDFa for Internet-Facing Applications
Mark Birbeck: XForms on the Desktop using Sidewinder
The slides for the first two talks are available online. We also heard Norm Walsh mentioned an XProc implementation in XQuery based on eXist (I guess this must be Jim Fuller's XProcXQ). XProc is an interesting new standard and I would love to see a simple implementation which can be easily integrated with eXist.