All,
I've read some (a web wander) of the docs on the WWW site (thanks for trying
to hard w/
those, and for asking for feedback...) and here are a few bits of
feedback/questions:
1) I'm on W2K, and I checked out xindice from CVS, and put a DOS session
into the xindice directory. I typed xindice ... (to follow examples) and I
kept stumbling on a xindice.bat in that directory, not the one in bin. Don't
know if these have to be called the same, or not. Maybe the upper one could
be called xindiced.* (for daemon) or xindice_server.* or something.
2) I downloaded tomcat & dropped xindice's webapp in, and it worked fine
(when I copied to webapps not webapp, by typo) but I don't know tomcat's
system.xml and did have to noodle a little on where to put the xindice
context entry. Before I woke to the obvious (that the webapp contained the
main config stuff) I kept fussing over that server.xml entry. I half
considered some sort of include, but (soon enough) realized that I ought
cut-n-paste. I know you 'note' this section needs to be added (to docs) but
perhaps add the words cut-n-paste. Also, you reference the path /xindice,
when it is really /.xindice{version}. Minor nits, but newbies need gentle
handling to get going and get invested.
3) I ran tomcat, the webapp worked, and so I tried some xindice examples.
Failed w/ connectivity to 8888 (when I installed tomcat on 8080). Made me
realize there might be another listener, so poking around I ran "xindice
start", and things started working. I'm left not really understanding if
tomcat is being used or not. Not sure that matters, just would've been nice
not to download it (over my modem) until I needed it.
4) The run.bat in the guide/examples directory failed for me, the classpath
wasn't set correctly. At least, I got class not found exception on the fully
packaged Example1 I cut-n-paste from docs. [BTW: Seems somebody borrowed
that script from ant, and it shows a little. Not complaining, done it
myself, just wondering if it is completed/updated...]
5) Finally ... comprehension. Maybe this is for xmldb not xindice, per se,
but I am trying to open my mind to XML DBs (not get stuck in an RDBMS
mindset rut), but I just don't understand certain things. I can understand
collections, and nested collections, and doing queries over all documents in
such trees. But, I can't get past a mental view of a simple 'bucket-o-XML',
to some (seemingly) basic requirements:
- Are there concepts of collection joins, and such?
- [If no to above] if I wish to 'enrich' documents (or have reference
information for them) do I add that to the document prior to inserting it in
the database? Is that the XML DB way?
- Do documents reference each other (by id), or is that just 'not done'?
- If one wanted a simple set of persisted configuration, would one create a
collection for the application, and put one or more config documents in
there? [If I am going to work with a native XML DB, I feel I ought use it
for most of my stuff. Is this a typical mistake? Are there easy ways to do
these things?]
- Similarly, say I wanted a 'list of things to go look at', would I create a
document in a collection, access that document via XPATH (or is there such a
thing as a 'name'?) and then parse that document?
- Alternatively, [to above two] do folks typically use NXD w/ RDBMS (and/or
config systems), or standalone?
Thanks in advance for your time reading thing, and any responses.
regards,
Adam
--
Experience the Unwired Enterprise:
http://www.sybase.com/unwiredenterprise
Try Sybase: http://www.try.sybase.com
