Category Archives: eXist

oXygen Customisation

I finally got around to doing an oXygen-based authoring environment for a client. Well, what I did is a DocBook variant, plus some bits and pieces that differ from the oXygen standard DocBook offering. Be as it may, it was among the easiest, most straight-forward customisations I’ve done, and I’ve done a few. I did receive a few pointers from George Bina from Syncro Soft, the makers of oXygen (thanks, George!), but I really am amazed by the ease with which this is done.

The authoring environment is integrated with eXist, the XML database, and that part was very easy. It’s all there. I didn’t have to do anything beyond creating a few collections, user groups and new users. It simply works, and yet I’m implementing the Release Candidate (of eXist) rather than a stable version.

Pretty damned cool.

No, I’m not associated with Syncro Soft or the eXist development, and I’m not paid by them in any way, quite the opposite, but I’ve always heard that you should give credit where credit is due.

XML Prague 2013

Somewhat surprisingly, the XML Prague 2013 paper I mentioned in an earlier post was accepted. Considering how little time I had to write it (“writing” is probably a bit of a stretch, “drafting” is more to the point), I have to say I’m extremely pleased. I’m very much looking forward to presenting it.

I’m going to talk about the eXist-based publishing solution I’ve been busy doing for a client. It began as a humble PDF-on-demand service but came to include a lot of stuff I find cool in and slightly outside the world of XML. There’s XProc, XQuery, RelaxNG, the process XML abstraction I have been working on, XML authoring, nightly mirroring from SQL databases to eXist, and more. And it all seems to come together quite well. I’ve had fun working with all this so I’m hoping it might be of interest to others, too.

XML Prague, of course, is worth a visit regardless. Think of it as an XML weekend about cool new things frequently starting with an “X”, interesting people, Czech hospitality (including Czech beer), and one of my favourite cities, Prague.

eXistential Issues

I’ve been toying with eXist with increasing fascination, lately. I’ve even been wishing I was more of a programmer, reading up on http, REST, and other stuff somewhat related to running an XML database on the web. I’ve been actively trying to find out what server(s) to use to run my blog in parallel to an eXist setup.

It’s got to be some kind of crisis and I am going to seek help.