Category Archives: eXist-DB

Balisage 2025

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My paper on my little CMS (details won’t be available for a while yet) project has been accepted at Balisage. It feels a bit like cheating, to be honest, because that paper is simply a development of any number of papers and ideas before it, from versioning to S2000M. I’ve been thinking about content management fora very long time. My CMS — called JACMS (Just another CMS) for now — is intended to provide a simpler alternative than pretty much anything I’ve done for customers in the past. But JACMS is also very much what I think a good CMS should be, in terms of how we treat content.

And before you ask, no, a “CMS” to me is not WordPress or Drupal.

So, we’ll see.

XML Prague Is Over

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This year’s XML Prague is over and I’m writing this at the Munich airport on my way back home. My brain is still hurting.

The conference was fabulous, as always. Among the highlights were Gerrit Imsieke’s awesome XSLT trickery for splitting XML, Steven Pemberton’s walk-through of his Invisible XML spec, and Michael Piotrowski’s nostalgic look back at SGML. But my personal favourite has to be Adam Retter’s introduction to his new Fusion DB XML (and NoSQL) database that I think just might prove to be a game-changer. He’s launching it in June at Markup UK in London – another great reason for everyone to join us there!

I also gave a paper at XML Prague, about merging two XML sources of the Swedish Code of Statutes, also known as SFS, a project I’ve been busy with for the last eight months or so. It’s been quite a ride, and if you’re interested, have a look at the XML Prague proceedings. There are lot of other good papers there, too.

Feeling Like A (Real) Programmer

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I’ve spent most of tonight writing an XQuery script that reads stuff from a linkbase I’m using to keep track of resources in eXist. It’s not much yet, just a couple of queries to get resource URIs based on various conditions, but it strikes me that doing an extended XLink implementation in eXist really shouldn’t be that hard. Even by a non-programmer such as yours truly.

Updating an eXist-DB System

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We’re doing a major overhaul on an eXist-DB system we built for the Swedish Federation of Farmers. There’s a bit of everything in this one. There’s XProc running nightly conversions and on-demand publishing with FO, an oXygen editing environment based on DocBook, and XForms and XQuery for various administrative tasks. It’s a pretty cool system already, and now we’re making it better.

Looking forward to this one.