A communiqué from Tom Bradford reports on the recent production release of dbXML Version 2.0 by the dbXML Group.
dbXML is a Native XML Database "capable of storing and indexing collections of XML documents in both native and mapped forms for highly efficient querying, transformation, and retrieval. In addition to these capabilities, the server may also be extended to provide business logic in the form of scripts, classes and triggers."
New features in the dbXML Version 2.0 release include journaling transactions, XSLT transformations, full text indexing and full text querying, pluggable security models, a new command line system, new client/server APIs, SSL connection support, JSP Tag Library support, and embedded database APIs.
dbXML 2.0 as an open source project governed by the terms of the GNU General Public License.
This version of dbXML is basically "a complete rewrite of the dbXML 1.0 code, which forked into the Apache Xindice project. dbXML was developed using the Java 2 Standard Edition version 1.4, and should operate properly on all platforms to which J2SE 1.4 has been ported."
The dbXML Group also "provides commercial licenses for situations where utilization under the terms of the GPL are inappropriate. Those using or deploying dbXML in a commercial environment may wish to consider contacting the group to discuss commercial licensing and support."
From the dbXML 2.0 Release Notes
"Between the first release candidate and now, only a few minor bugs were found:
- Newer versions of Xerces are strict about parsing the "]]>" sequence when it doesn't belong to a CDATA section. Labrador serialized that sequence incorrectly and was causing parsing problems. This problem has been resolved.
- The latest version of Xalan had a method return value that was not class-compatible with the older version. This was causing the XUpdate engine to fail with a ClassCastException. This problem has been resolved.
- Collections weren't removing their Labrador context when being dropped or otherwise disposed of, which would result in a phantom Collection if one were to connect to the Collection directly. This has been resolved.
- Because the getInformation RPC method was exposed by both CollectionProxy and ContentProxy, attempting to connect a CollectionClient to a Document (or vice versa) would result in a Null Pointer Exception. This has been resolved.
About dbXML Professional
- dbXML's XML Compression system allows documents to be stored as a tokenized stream, allowing faster performance and improved memory conservation
- Extensive caching throughout the database helps to improve performance dramatically
- XPath querying provides high-performance collection-level querying that utilizes indexes whenever possible
- Extensions can be registered that encapsulate business logic and provide more efficient XML data processing.
- Database extensions can be developed in Java, ECMAScript (JavaScript), and Python
- Triggers are private database extensions that allow content to be filtered going in and coming out of the database
Principal references:
- Announcement
- dbXML 2.0 product description
- dbxml.com web site
- Screen shot
- dbXML API
- dbXML Programmer's Guide
- GPL license
- dbXML at SourceForge
- dbXML project files
- dbXML mailing lists at Yahoo Groups:
- dbXML-Users: A general discussion for dbXML Users
- dbXML-Devel: A Focused discussion for dbXML Developers
- Contact: Tom Bradford
- "XML and Databases" - Main reference page.
