Monday, 15th August 2011
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,
The eXist-db team are very proud to announce the release of eXist-db version 1.4.1.
Version 1.4.1 is not your average point release and concludes almost two years of hard work from the developers, contributors and the community. There are more bug-fixes and stability improvements that you can shake a very pointy stick at, and we believe that it is the best version of eXist-db yet.
There is far too much to pack into a short list, the full change list can be found here but, the highlights include:
- Referential Integrity – no more vanishing index entries, so no more failed document updates and inconsistent documents.
- Database Shutdown and Crash Protection – numerous improvements by us, which means less unnecessary recovery runs by you.
- WebDAV – completely new implementation, based on the solid Milton WebDAV Server library. Enabled by default, but don't panic, the old version is still present should you need it!
- Lucene Full-Text Indexing – upgraded to version 2.9.2 for a performance boost, configurable analyzers, configurable parameters, better match highlighting and additional functions for working with Lucene document fields.
- XForms – The betterFORM server-side XForms 1.1 engine now ships with eXist-db and is enabled by default. The included XSLTForms XForms engine has been updated.
- EXPath – The EXPath projects HTTP Client XQuery module has been implemented as a first step towards EXPath portable XQuery.
- Improved transaction handling – scheduled and direct system tasks no longer need exclusive access to the database. e.g. the Backup system task can operate whilst your database is still online.
- Indexing architecture – many improvements for both performance and stability.
- Resolution of all reported database lock contention issues.
Heads Up! → As we mentioned, this is no ordinary point release, and as such the legacy full-text index in eXist-db 1.4 has been disabled by default in 1.4.1. The legacy full-text index can of course be re-enabled through conf.xml, however there are several integrity issues that we will not fix, instead we suggest moving to the newer Lucene based full-text index.
We have tried to ensure that upgrading from eXist-db 1.4 to 1.4.1 is as easy as possible, however should you need some assistance or support above and beyond what the community provides then please consider eXist Solutions, without whom this release would not have been possible.
Version 1.4.1 will most likely be the last major release in the 1.4.x line. Whilst we are also planning to release a preview of eXist-db 1.6 in the next couple of months, 1.4.1 should be considered the current stable, suitable for production use, version of eXist-db.
Finally, we would like to thank the eXist-db community, contributors and developers for all their hard work on eXist-db 1.4.1.
Thanks and Enjoy :-)
eXist-db version 1.4.1 is available here - http://www.exist-db.org/download.html
Thank you
The eXist-db team
Original message appeared on the exist-open mailing list.