eXist

Preface

Welcome

Welcome, dear reader, to our book on eXist. Whether you have purchased, begged, borrowed, or stolen this book, we hope that you find its contents of great use when applied to solving your information management problems.

While it’s true that eXist has been around for some years now—in fact, for longer than many of the now popular NoSQL platforms—eXist has continued to innovate and evolve. eXist, while stable and widely used for many years, has now hit a milestone in its history where it can be considered “battle-worn”—a veteran, if you like (or as we like to say in software engineering, “mature”). We have considered writing a book on eXist for the past few years, but we now know that the time is right to share our knowledge with the world. Welcome eXist 2.0.

Who Is This Book For?

Perhaps we should first answer this question with another question: Who is eXist for?

eXist aims to meet the requirements of a wide user base, and therefore is probably the most feature-rich product in its class. eXist has been engineered over the years to meet the needs of users ranging from humanities students and professors undertaking interesting linguistic projects, to large international publishers working with millions of documents, to developers wishing to rapidly create document- and data-driven web applications, and most cases in between.

This book aims to meet the needs of a wide audience: from tinkerers, students, professors, and information managers right up to software engineers. ...