Inspirational Technology

Legal Troubles For Hydra

Hydra is in trouble over their name. This naming thing is starting to get really annoying. If you ever wondered why the Xindice project has such a weird name, here's your answer. When I came up with the Xindice name I spent a lot of time using the Babelfish translator and google searches to come up with something that was somewhat meaningful somewhere, yet didn't show up in Google results. Indice is Spanish and Italian (among others) for index, it's also used in english as a plural form of index. Xindice is a made up word of course, but at least now when you type it into a search engine you're pretty much sure you'll get information about the Xindice native XML database. It also means the probability of a naming conflict is small. Obviously Google isn't authoritative on global naming, but it's better then nothing when you can't afford a trademark lawyer. I like naming things using made up words.

Saxon does XQuery

i just discovered that Saxon now includes support for XQuery. Probably old news for people in the XSL community, but news to me. I'm not much of a fan of XQuery, but it looks like Saxon will finally bring a usable implementation to play with. There's a discussion starting about using it to implement XQuery in Xindice. Unfortunately, it's under the Mozilla Public License which will probably kill that idea.

Xindice Wiki

Just discovered there's a Wiki setup for the Xindice project. That's a very good thing to see as one of the major problems with the Apache projects is that it's too much trouble to update the web site regularly and this leads to stale sites. The Xindice web site is a prime example of this. I was looking at it the other day and noticed it doesn't even have any links to where you can download Xindice 1.1. The problem is it's a multistep process, you have to write the content in XML using Forrest, build the site, make sure it's right and then copy it up to the server. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal, but for me it's enough that it got in the way of making as many updates as I'd like. It seems this has carried forward with the current committers as well.

The other major benefit of the Wiki is that anyone can edit it and this leads to incremental development of the content. There's no bottleneck waiting for someone to come in and publish things.

Xindice Project Web Site Statistics

I just noticed that there's a page showing interesting graphs of statistics for various Apache projects. The page for Xindice is interesting. Looks like Xindice is downloaded roughly 7,000 times per month. I'm sure this was probably posted on the mailing list at some point, but I completely missed it. It's interesting to compare it to the stats I posted shortly after the dbXML project was moved to the ASF to become Xindice.

Computerworld on Native XML Databases

Computerworld has an article looking for success stories in using native XML databases.

I'm also interested in this topic. In particular I'm interested in success stories using any of the Open Source native XML databases. Particularly, Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML, Xindice and eXist. If you have any please feel free to contact me. I'm looking at a number of writing projects coming up in the future that revolve around this topic.

Xindice Project Needs Help

In order to get a final Xindice 1.1 release out the Xindice project needs more help.

In particular someone is needed to complete the work on building a standalone distribution that uses Jetty as the container. Also extremely important, the documentation needs major updates to account for the significant changes that have been introduced since the 1.0 release.

Xindice 1.1b2 Released

Xindice 1.1 beta 2 has been released.

Just the next step to finally getting a 1.1 stable release out.

New Xindice 1.1 Build Available

I've been virtually silent about Xindice lately, but Kevin Ross has stepped up as a new leader within the project and has just announced the release of a new Xindice build. This is a 1.1 build and Kevin seems intent on getting a 1.1 release out, something I'm very happy to hear. My original plans called for Xindice 1.1 to be released almost 1.5 years ago. The project has struggled a lot since then and my dropping in and out of it hasn't helped much. I did manage to get a 1.1 beta build out a couple months ago, but again had to drop out of the project before making any more progress.

Xindice definitely needs some new blood among its developers. Kevin has stepped up as a new leader, but he needs a lot more help.

XinCJ - C++ Inteface to Xindice

Hauke von Bremen sent me a link to XinCJ which is his C++ interface to Xindice. Looks like he mirrored the XML:DB API into C++.

JaxMe 1.53 with XML:DB API support

JaxMe 1.53 released with XML:DB API support. [xmlhack]

Cool, another XML:DB API implementation.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Came across an interesting article on O'Reilly network Building a Vector Space Search Engine in Perl that led me to an even more interesting paper on Latent Semantic Indexing. Fascinating stuff and could be very useful for providing full text indexing of XML data where you could add the XPath to a node as another dimension in the index. Something certainly worth exploring.

Xindice 1.1 beta 1

I've just posted builds of Xindice 1.1 Beta 1. Documentation is in a pretty bad state right now, but this is the first downloadable release of the 1.1 tree.

Because of the documentation issue, I'm not particularly happy with this release. We needed to get something out so that people can start migrating away from 1.0 systems. Hopefully someone will step up to write better documentation.

Xindice Documentation

This is a list of all known documentation for Xindice. If you know of something
that is not on this list, please let me know about it.
kstaken@xmldatabases.org

Documentation

Users Guide - The Xindice users guide.
Developers Guide - The Xindice developers guide
Administrators Guide - The Xindice administrators guide
Command Line Tools Reference - The Xindice command line tools reference
API Docs - Xindice API Javadoc (this is currently unavailable).
XML:DB API Spec - The specification for the XML:DB API used by Xindice.
XML:DB API Use Cases - Provides some examples of using the XML:DB API.
XML:DB XUpdate Spec - The specification for XUpdate used by Xindice.
XUpdate Use Cases - Example XUpdate queries.
Klemens Waldor's Xindice Notes - Some notes and tips from a Xindice user.
Xindice Wiki - Wiki with more documentation.
Xindice Internals - Describes the internal workings of Xindice

Tutorials

Running Xindice with Cocoon 2 - a short tutorial about using Xindice with Cocoon 2.0.1
Getting Started with Xindice 1.1 - Tom Dyson
How to send XML-RPC messages in Xindice 1.1 - Mark Szpakowski
Using Xindice within the Cocoon XMLForm Framework - Josema Alonso
We need some more.

Articles

Introduction to dbXML - From XML.com.
Introduction to the XML:DB API - From XML.com.
Introduction to Xindice - From IBM developerWorks.
Apache's Xindice Organizes XML Data Without Schema - From DevX.com.

Books

Beginning PHP4 Databases - Contains a chapter on using Xindice with PHP.

Mailing List Archives

xindice-dev - Archive for the main Xindice developers list.
xindice-users - Archive for the main Xindice Users list
XML:DB list archive - Archives for all the XML:DB lists, useful since Xindice uses the technology.
dbXML devel - The old dbXML developers archives. Still useful for some questions.
dbXML general - The old dbXML users archives. Still useful for some questions.

Xindice Software

This is a list of all known software that works with Xindice. If you know of something
that is not on this list, please let me know about it.
kstaken@xmldatabases.org

Tools

Xindice - The Xindice server software.
Xindice XML-RPC - An XML-RPC implementation.
Labrador - A web services framework that can also be used to access Xindice via XML-RPC.
PHP Xindice - PHP client and admin tool.
CFXindice - Cold Fusion client for Xindice.
Apache Cocoon - Cocoon 2 contains some XML:DB API hooks to work with Xindice.
Xindice HTTP - An interface to retrieve documents from Xindice via HTTP.
Xindice Browser - A Java/Swing browser for data stored within a Xindice database.
YAB - (Yet Another Browser) - Another Java/Swing browser for data stored within a Xindice database.
Attrezzo per Xindice - Xindice administration tool designed to run within the Eclipse IDE.
XinCon(Offline as of 3/4/2003) - WebDAV server and web based administration tool for Xindice.
Xindice.Net - Tools for working with Xindice within Microsoft's .Net environment.
Xindice Installer(Offline as of 3/4/2003) - Windows installer to make setting up Xindice on Windows much easier.
XML-SimpleDB - Perl implementation of the XML:DB API that works with the Xindice XML-RPC interface.
Xindice for Zope - A bridge to Xindice from within the Zope environment.
SiXDML - Simple XML data manipulation language implementation for Xindice 1.0
XinCJ - C++ API for Xindice

Applications

Java Web Services Developer Pack - Contains a UDDI implementation built on top of Xindice.
Discussion Forums - A port of the Jive discussion forums software to the XML:DB API.
XMLBlaster MOM - XMLBlaster has a Xindice driver for use as a persistence layer in their messaging system.
CocoBlog - A weblog system built on top of Cocoon and Xindice.