Tom Bradford wrote: [...] > I'm gonna say something personal now, and this is not directed to you > specifically Dave, but to our user community. > > For over a year, Kimbro and I have worked our asses of to develop > dbXML. There have been people who have contributed on occasion, and for > that, we are very grateful, but for the most part, our user community > has used the project, made requests and/or complained about it, but have > left it up to the two of us to do something about it. We're two people, > and this project is a major undertaking, so you do the math. Yes, it's > a database, it's not something that's easy to write or maintain, but we > don't need people who know the database internals to make valuable > contributions. We need documentation, we need better command-line > tools, and better scripts for proper building and behavior on different > operating systems. These things aren't much to ask for from this > community.
Speaking for both myself and our team here at Sun, we think what you guys have done is phenomenal, and hope that the visibility you'll get from Apache and from Sun's use of Xindice in our project will provide a wider audience of interest, and therefore a wider pool of resources to assist in improving it. I expect that Xindice will be *very* widely used, once people get wind of it. It fills in a big gap and allows for things like persistent DOMs, long term storage of parsed content, etc. to really take off. Tom and Kimbro, you've done some excellent work. > Now that we're part of the Apache project, I suspect that we'll get > increased contributions from those people already working on other > Apache projects, but I fear that our user community will continue to do > as you've done, which is use the project, make requests and/or complain > about things, but leave it up to the Apache people to fix things. One > of the biggest criticisms of projects like Xalan and Xerces is that > they're company-run and that nobody outside of those company's > contributes to the projects. Well, there are only three people working > on Xalan, and I don't think they're turning people away from making > contributions. Niether will we. > > We're at the start of something great. We could make it great for you, > our you can make it great with us. It's up to you. I've got a rendition of the ITIS zoological taxonomy as a topic map that is well over 150MB, which will end up in Xindice, accessed node-by-node. I still need to get clearance from the Smithsonian, but that's a matter of time. Come February, I'll also be using it in my Ph.D. project, which will link Xindice up with TouchGraph (at SourceForge) in displaying Topic Map graphs of ontologies as used in research organization and authoring (that last part is essentially a technical rendition of the title of my thesis). And this will all be released in open source, of course. Xindice represents a major contribution to the XML community as well as the community in general (eg., I think it will be used extensively in the academic and scientific communities), and if there was some way of calling for a round of applause online, I'd do it -- you guys deserve it. It's well designed, it works (even given the glitches in transitioning from dbXML to Xindice and the concomitant parser difficulties), so that as you say Tom, anyone complaining about a lack of documentation or any bugs is well invited to contribute. Murray ........................................................................... Murray Altheim, Staff Engineer <mailto:murray.altheim@sun.com> Java and XML Software Sun Microsystems, 1601 Willow Rd., MS UMPK17-102, Menlo Park, CA 94025 Ernst Martin comments in 1949, "A certain degree of noise in writing is required for confidence. Without such noise, the writer would not know whether the type was actually printing or not, so he would lose control."
