Greg Watson, IT Specialist, Defense Intelligence Agency Missile and Space Intelligence Center (apparently it IS rocket science). I installed eXist last night to follow along with the talk.
“If you have a larger dataset, eXist may not be the best choice.” Recommended reading: XQuery by Priscilla Walmsley, XQuery wikibook.
Download and install. Needs a full JDK (Mac includes this already in /Library/Java/Home), a mere JRE is insufficient. Start up with bin/startup.sh.
eXist-specific useful functions: request:get-parameter() from the URI query string. transform:transform() function invokes XSLT from within XQuery.
Example uses doc() to fetch an external URL of RSS, check individual items with contains(). Every example is a fully-formed, click-on-a-link-to-run program.
XQuery and PHP: reallly basic integration with simplexml_load_file($myXQueryURL).
Loading scripts into eXist: He uses XML Spy. eXist has a Jaa Web Start admin client.
Q&A: How bit is too big? Maybe 10-20-30 thousand docs. Generate indexes? Yes.
-m
(Production note: somehow, this one didn’t get published live. Now it is.)
I’ve heard good things about eXist, but when I tried it, I wanted to load a 70M XML file into it, and couldn’t find a way to do it without some piece of Java code running out of memory. Pity.
Cheers, Tony.