We just reached another milestone in our struggle to make eXist 100% conformant with the XQuery specs: 99.4%! Details can be found on the official W3C XQuery Test Suite pages.
Recent changes were mostly related to namespace handling, though we also had a number of small fixes to the XQuery parser, including whitespace processing and ordering declarations.
The upcoming next release of eXist will introduce quite a few changes with respect to index types and index creation. While your old index configuration should still work with the new version, knowing the new features and possibilities can sometimes result in a dramatic performance boost.
To better understand the changes, we have to look at two different areas of development, which both have direct effects on indexing features:
This site is now going public as we are starting to switch the links on the eXist homepage to point to We will try to move all valuable contents from the old wiki into here. This has to be done manually though as the old server is definitely dead. Well, it's a good chance to re-read and evaluate all the old stuff.
The new site will be in a "private beta" mode for now, which means that only selected users can edit entries. We will open registration for other users once we are sure the system is running stable enough.
What you can see here is a first live version of AtomicWiki, my XQuery-based Wiki engine. AtomicWiki started as an experiment to create a simple blog on top of eXist's existing Atom support. Eventually, more and more features were added during the past months, so the project has more evolved into a wiki-style system than "just" a weblog.
AtomicWiki is entirely based on the Atom Publishing Protocol and syndication format. All entries are stored as Atom feeds in eXist. We use the Atom Publishing Protocol to create and manipulate feeds and entries. Nearly all the functionality - except one Java function for parsing Wiki markup - is implemented in XQuery with the help of some XSLT and Javascript.
What makes AtomicWiki really powerful though, is its tight integration with XQuery!