Adam R. B. Jack wrote:
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.
Well... May be.
2) I downloaded tomcat & dropped xindice's webapp in,
Have you renamed it as doc says? Nope, of course you did not: I forgot to upload updated doc! Check it out:
http://xml.apache.org/xindice/community/howto/installation/tomcat.html#Steps
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.
You don't have to touch tomcat's config. And path really should be "/xindice" if you want xindice clients to work without changes to configuration.
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).
If you deploy on 8080, you should tell clients so. This is done by using proper xmldb connect URI:
xmldb:xindice://localhost:8080/db/
Made me realize there might be another listener, so poking around I ran "xindice start", and things started working.
You started second, independent, xindice server with out database in another directory.
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.
No, you don't need it. But folks like tomcat, so there is a doco explaining how to use tomcat + xindice.
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...]
I'm not sure that sample scripts are up-to-date. Send in a patch with improvements.
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?
Never heard about such thing. But if you want to query XML DB, you should use XQuery (not implemented).
- [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?
:-)
For XML:DB way I think you can ask XML:DB forum. But I'd guess that XLink (for referencing) and XInclude (for "enriching") can provide what you are asking for (neither is built into xindice (yet)).
- Do documents reference each other (by id), or is that just 'not done'?
Not done, see above.
- 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'?)
Document (or object) ID: bin\xindice ad -c /db/test -n my-document-id
If document ID is not provided xindice will generate one. http://xml.apache.org/xindice/guide-user.html#Adding+Documents
Vadim
