Added faq question
Added link to wiki
Cheers, Jim Fuller
ps: also doing a complete review of existing docs, do u want diff patch
for docs as well ?
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE faqs PUBLIC "-//APACHE//DTD FAQ V1.1//EN" "faq-v11.dtd">
<!--
- Version: $Revision: 1.9 $ $Date: 2003/12/25 22:06:48 $
- Author: Vladimir R. Bossicard ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
-->
<faqs title="Frequently Asked Questions">
<authors>
<person name="Vadim Gritsenko" email="[EMAIL PROTECTED]"/>
<person name="Kimbro Staken" email="[EMAIL PROTECTED]"/>
</authors>
<!--
<faq>
<question>
</question>
<answer>
<p>
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
-->
<faq>
<question>What is Xindice?</question>
<answer>
<p>
Xindice is an open source Native XML Database. It stores and indexes
compressed XML documents in order to provide that data to a client
application with very little server-side processing overhead. It
also provides functionality that is unique to XML data, which can't
easily be reproduced by relational databases.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>What is Xindice not?</question>
<answer>
<p>
Xindice is not a persistent DOM implementation. It was not designed
to store and manage single monster sized documents, where one
document is treated as a set of mini documents. It was
specifically designed for managing many small to medium sized
documents.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>Why not use a relational database?</question>
<answer>
<p>
XML documents are organized as tree structures. Relational
databases organize data in a tabular, or grid-like fashion, and
use relational linking in order to expose hierarchical constraints
on the data. Unfortunately, while it's generally very easy to map
relational data into XML, trying to map XML, which can be very
complex and freeform, into relational data can be incredibly
difficult and lossy.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>Why not use an object database?</question>
<answer>
<p>
Object database are tightly coupled with the applications that
they serve, and are not generally considered to be client/server
databases. Typically, the objects that they manage can only be
deserialized and used by the programming language that created
them. While object graphs like DOM trees can be persisted in
object databases, the number of objects that are produced for a
a large collection of XML documents can become a serious
performance and resource bottleneck.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>Why not use a full-text indexing engine?</question>
<answer>
<p>
Full text indexing engines are very fast and appropriate for
performing broad queries across a set of documents. The
drawbacks to using them for XML applications is that creating
an inverted index causes you to lose document context, requiring
very intensive post-processing to isolate the document nodes
that are being managed. Xindice provides efficient indexing of
element and attribute values in addition to the ability to
return and manage aggregated document fragments.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>What query languages do you support?</question>
<answer>
<p>
Xindice supports XPath and XUpdate. XPath is the W3C's XML
Pathing language, and is a very powerful way of selecting sets of
nodes from documents in a collection. XUpdate is the XML:DB
Initiative's updating language, and is very flexible in its ability
to update sets of documents that meet specific XPath criteria.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>Is your XPath implementation fully compliant?</question>
<answer>
<p>
Our XPath implementation is the Apache Software Foundation's Xalan
library. Xindice provides indexing mechanisms and query
optimization facilities to augment the performance of collection
level XPath queries, but Xalan ultimately has the final say in
any query.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>Which JDK should I use?</question>
<answer>
<p>
We recommend Sun's SDK for Java 1.4 or 1.3. Xindice will not work
with the SDK 1.2 or earlier. When using 1.3, be aware that there
are known issues with Sun's SDK for Java 1.3.1 on several Linux
distributions, but 1.3.0 or 1.4.2 should work without any problems.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>
The XML:DB API is missing something, what should I do?
</question>
<answer>
<p>
The XML:DB API is being designed be the XML:DB Initiative, and
so its interfaces and classes are predetermined by that group.
If you have any questions or would like to help further define
the standard API for XML databases, please visit
<link href="http://www.xmldb.org";>http://www.xmldb.org</link>.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>
My 5 megabyte file is crashing the command line, help?
</question>
<answer>
<p>
See FAQ #2. Xindice wasn't designed for monster documents,
rather, it was designed for collections of small to medium
sized documents. The best thing to do in this case would be to
look at your 5 megabyte file, and determine whether or not it's
a good candidate for being sliced into a set of small documents.
If so, you'll want to extract the separate documents and add
them to a Xindice collection individually. A good example of
this, would be a massive document of this form:
</p>
<source>
<cars>
<car>
<make>Boyoda</make>
<model>Cordova</model>
<year>1989</year>
</car>
<car>
<make>Frod</make>
<model>Tortorus</model>
<year>1990</year>
</car>
...
</cars>
</source>
<p>
In this case, it makes more sense to split the file into
several <code><car/></code> documents instead of a
single <code><cars/></code> document.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>XML parser conflict</question>
<answer>
<source>
org/w3c/dom/DOMException
at org.Xindice.xml.dom.NodeImpl.<clinit>(NodeImpl.java:86)
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:120)
at org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser.setDocumentClassNa
...
</source>
<p>
This is also a common error one will encounter, and usually is
related to having more than one version of the Xerces XML Parser
on your CLASSPATH. Before running Xindice or any client programs,
be sure that the Xerces Jar file that is included in the Xindice
distribution is the first Xerces Jar file on your CLASSPATH.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>
Where is my database?
</question>
<answer>
<p>
Since Xindice 1.1 the database is running under an application
server (e.g. Tomcat). The database configuration is located at
[your webapps directory]/xindice/WEB-INF/system.xml (assuming
of course that your war was unpacked by the container).
</p>
<p>
Xindice configuration, by default, uses "./db" as the database
location, which is assumed as a path relative to the webapp's
/WEB-INF location. This means that usually the database will
be located at [your webapps directory]/xindice/WEB-INF/db.
</p>
<p>
This behaviour can be overridden in two ways: either by editing
/WEB-INF/system.xml and setting an absolute path as the "dbroot"
attribute of the "root-collection" tag, or by setting the Java
property "xindice.db.home" to a path that will be the parent for
the "./db" directory. As an example, setting the property on the
command line with a value of "/var/xindice"
(-Dxindice.db.home=/var/xindice) will mean that the database will
be found at /var/xindice/db.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
<faq>
<question>
Where are my commandline tools ?
</question>
<answer>
<p>
The latest src release contains the xindice commandline.
</p>
</answer>
</faq>
</faqs>
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE book PUBLIC "-//APACHE//DTD Cocoon Documentation Book V1.0//EN" "book-cocoon-v10.dtd">
<!--
- Version: $Revision: 1.7 $ $Date: 2003/12/25 22:06:48 $
- Author: Vladimir R. Bossicard ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
-->
<book software="Xindice" title="Xindice" copyright="The Apache Software Foundation" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink";>
<menu label="Project">
<menu-item label="Overview" href="index.html"/>
<menu-item label="News" href="news.html"/>
<menu-item label="License" href="license.html"/>
<menu-item label="Changes" href="changes.html"/>
<menu-item label="Todo" href="todo.html"/>
<menu-item label="Download" href="http://xml.apache.org/xindice/download.cgi"/>
<menu-item label="Download Template" type="hidden" href="download.html"/>
</menu>
<menu label="Documentation">
<menu-item label="Administrator Guide" href="guide-administrator.html"/>
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<menu-item label="Developer Guide" href="guide-developer.html"/>
<menu-item label="Commandline Tool Guide" href="guide-tools.html"/>
<menu-item label="FAQ" href="faq.html"/>
<menu-item label="Javadocs" href="api/index.html"/>
<menu-item label="WIKI" href="http://nagoya.apache.org/wiki/apachewiki.cgi?XindiceProjectPages"/>
</menu>
<menu label="Community">
<menu-item label="Contributing" href="contributing.html"/>
<menu-item label="Who we are" href="who.html"/>
<menu-item label="Mailing lists" href="mail.html"/>
<menu-item label="Code Repository" href="http://xml.apache.org/cvs.html"/>
<menu-item label="Bug database" href="http://nagoya.apache.org/bugzilla/index.html"/>
</menu>
<menu label="Resources">
<menu-item label="Related links" href="related.html"/>
<menu-item label="XML:DB Initiative" href="http://www.xmldb.org"/>
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