The last status.xml I saw was a year ago from Vladimir Bossicard. It was a little diffacult to connect the to-do items to code and there were no items reflecting what has been done. Nonetheless a valiant effort.
I think a good to-do / is-done list is needed. Similarly the items needs to be connected to some interfaces. That done we can pass the doc to the other xml db projects and start some sort of (any! sort of) consensus about 1) what are the necessary services, 2) the common services, and finally 3) how to commonly categorize the wildly divergent services. That done (or in progress) we can figure out 1) how to swap components supporting those interfaces, 2) which components are better, 3) which components to take, and 4) what few remaining things do we really need to do. I keep thinking xindice is almost there (one hole at a time ;)). If we could find our consensus, know what we have already, organize our efforts and leverage the best of breed, then the last mile might be a lot more fun. Maybe a race to the finish between projects. Also with all the projects working together on common problems (wasn't that an idea of opensource?), maybe a light will go on at xmldb initiative. Don ----- Original Message ----- From: "Kimbro Staken" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2003 4:54 PM Subject: Re: AW: Should Xindice be retired? There are actually four open source native XML databases of any maturity, Xindice, eXist, dbXML and Berkeley DB XML. Of those it pains me to say it, but in most ways Xindice is now the worst. However all four are released under different licenses and have different design constraints (although Xindice and dbXML are close). Since Xindice is the only non-viral licensed system It would definitely be a big loss if Xindice were to disappear. In my opinion, Xindice suffers from a number of problems. Probably the most significant is that the code, especially in the core database, is overly complex and suffers from a number of pre-mature optimizations that I really wish weren't there (in particular the compressed DOM). This complexity has prevented evolution of the core functionality as the core is simply too hard to change for developers unfamiliar with the code. I attribute this problem to the fact that Xindice was originally intended as a commercial product and was engineered to eventually be a viable product in that space. Unfortunately, the commercial support is no longer there, the original developers (Tom and myself) haven't been able to contribute and that complexity is now a major barrier to new developers being able to modify the code. I've struggled for a long time with what to do about this. With 1.1 I started trying to simplify things like throwing out CORBA and the custom application server that we used, but I never really figured out what to do with the database core. I explored various things from writing unit tests to experimenting with a complete rewrite starting from the bottom up, but I just couldn't commit the time required to make any real progress and eventually got pulled away completely. Today I still struggle with it, and I still have no answers for the problem. All I know is that Xindice needs new developers and those developers need to do whatever is necessary to make the system their own. There have been a lot of lessons learned about what an XML database needs to do. Maybe Xindice 1.0 needs to be called a prototype and an effort needs to be started to just start over. The project framework is here, there are a lot of talented developers who contribute to Apache projects and there is much to learn from the current system. On Dec 3, 2003, at 2:27 PM, Antoine Lévy-Lambert wrote: > Hi Kevin, > > on the "open source market" for xml databases there are Xindice and > exist. > I think that XML databases are a nice thing and that it is good that > the ASF > has its own. > Do you think that exist is better than Xindice, or are you just > worried that > you do not have enough committers on the project ? > I am not saying I want to become one, but maybe if you are patient > there > could be some joining your group. > I need to test xindice for a project I am doing for my company. > > Cheers, > > Antoine > > -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- > Von: news [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Auftrag von Kevin O'Neill > Gesendet: Mittwoch, 3. Dezember 2003 22:03 > An: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Betreff: Should Xindice be retired? > > > There has been very little development done on Xindice over the last > three > months and it may be the case that we are doing users a disservice by > not > letting users know that the project is effectively inactive. > > Is it time to retire the project? > > -k. > > (Hard hat and flame suite on ;)) > > > > Kimbro Staken Software, Consulting and Writing http://www.xmldatabases.org/ Apache Xindice native XML database http://xml.apache.org/xindice XML:DB Initiative http://www.xmldb.org
