Ongoing Projects

A refactoring of eXists HTTP Interfaces - EXistServlet, RESTServer, SOAPServer, WebDAV.

Benefits

• Upgrade to Jetty 6
• Make use of NIO (take lessons from Apache MINA)
• Simplify and reduce the code
• Improve testability
• Allow easy extensibility
• Simplify control and configuration

The XFormsFilter provided with eXist allows integration with an older version of Chiba and provides XHTML output support for Chiba. The XFormsFilter concept has now been adopted by Chiba as their preferred access method.

We need to investigate whether Chiba is still an active and relevant implementation of XForms and if so a new integration with Chiba should be provided.

Open Tasks for Chiba Integration

• Analysis of Chiba viability
• Contributions to Chiba's XFormsFilter to support operation without additional Servlets
• Build scripts for integrating eXist and Chiba
• Documentation

SOAPServer provided with eXist at present is limited and un-documented. As a proof of concept it works well but now needs to be extended to provide a production quality feature.

Open Tasks

• JUnit test cases
• Compliant XML-RPC style service support
• Compliant document/literal style service support
• Support for returning element() from a web service
• Better configuration of what is a web service i.e. not using .xqws extension (metadata?)
• Document

Until now, eXist's support for XInclude is limited to resources stored in the database, i.e. the following won't work:

Open tasks

Implementation is nearly complete, just some tests are missing.

I'm working to extend my XQueryURLRewrite servlet filter into a (very) basic model-view-controller framework inspired by django or similar products. XQueryURLRewrite is used by AtomicWiki to map URL spaces to XQueries. It does so by calling a controller XQuery, which tells the servlet filter how the request should be processed. The request can be sent to another servlet or path or even an XQuery function.

The next step would be to allow a view to be applied to the response. The view could again be a servlet or another XQuery function.

The documentation that comes with eXist should be made searchable. I started working on a search interface which is based on eXist's own full text search features.

The application should eventually serve as an example webapp for a beginner's tutorial.

Open tasks

• add links from search results into the documentation

A nearly finished implementation of the XQuery API for Java (XQJ) is available in SVN. It was started as a Google Summer of Code project in 2007 and provides two XQJ drivers, one for embedded database access, one for remote access.

I recently invested some time to bring the branch into sync with the current trunk. The remote database driver, which is based on the REST-style HTTP interface of eXist, should already be pretty usable. The embedded driver needs some redesign though (it breaks the test suite). However, it should not be too much work to fix this and finally merge it into trunk.

Open Tasks

• integrate the official XQJ test suite
• test for standard conformance
• fix the embedded database driver
• merge into trunk
• performance tests