MarkLogic Server 4.1, App Services released

I’m thrilled to announce MarkLogic 4.1 and with it my project App Services, is here. Top-of-the-post props go out to Colleen, David, and Ryan who made it happen.

You might already know that MarkLogic Server is a super-powerful database slash search engine powering projects like MarkMail. (But did you know there’s a free-as-in-beer edition?) The next step is to make it easier to use and build your own apps on top of the server.

The first big piece is the Search API, which lets you do “Google-style” searches over your content like this:

search:search(“MP3 OR iPod AND color:black -Zune”)

The built-in grammar includes AND, OR, parens for grouping, – for negation, quotations for phrases, and easy ways to define facets like date:today or author:”Bill Shakespeare” or GPA:3.95. By passing in additional options, you can redefine the grammar and control all aspects of the search and how the results are returned. Numerous grass-roots efforts at doing someting like this had begun to spring up, so the time was right to come out with an officially-sanctioned API. For those developers who haven’t seen the light yet and don’t fancy XQuery, an API like this is a huge benefit.

The next piece builds on the Search API to offer a graphical App Builder tool that produces a simplified MarkMail-type app around your content. It looks like this:

The App Builder itself is based on XForms via the excellent XSLTForms library and REST, making it a full-blown XRX application.

Lots more info, videos, screencasts, articles, and more are coming soon.

You can start playing with this now by visiting the download page. Under the Community License, you can put 10 gigs of content into it for noncommercial production free-as-in-beer.

Enjoy! I’ll be catching my breath for the next two months*. -m

* Not really