System Mobile, Inc

Monday saw the rather surprising announcement that VMware is acquiring SpringSource for about $420m all in. After the initial shock wore off, the next question had to be: Why bother acquiring SpringSource in the first place? According to the press release:

VMware and SpringSource plan to deliver compelling new solutions that enable companies to more efficiently build, run and manage applications within both internal and external cloud architectures.

So VMware is going to attempt to use SpringSource’s code to virtualize application deployments and management. Given Spring’s hooks into several application frameworks, it’s certainly possible but by no means guaranteed.

With a recent stock downgrade (from Buy to Underperform), VMware has to make something happen quickly to justify spending over $400m for glorified middleware.

VMware shares are down just over 2% today.

nick Entry acquisitions, spring, vmware

Recently I needed to be able to be able to query a bunch of XML files using XQuery. I looked at some options like CouchDB but ultimately I needed a database of some sort that had native support for XQuery. While it looks like you can add on or hack in XQuery support to CouchDB, I preferred to keep things simple and went with eXist.

eXist allows you to store XML documents, with supporting DTDs and schemas, and access the collections using various mechanisms like REST or WebDAV. Once you have a number of XML documents in your repository, issuing an XQuery using the REST interface is pretty simple:

<br /> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><br /> <query xmlns="http://exist.sourceforge.net/NS/exist" xmlns:foo="http://www.systemmobile.com/2006-05-05/foo"><br /> <text><br /> <![CDATA[<br /> for $i in /foo:Bar<br /> return <result>{$i/@priority}</result><br /> ]]><br /> </text><br /> </query><br />

The above query will return a something like:

<br /> <exist:result xmlns:exist="http://exist.sourceforge.net/NS/exist" exist:hits="24" exist:start="1" exist:count="10"><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> <result priority="1"/><br /> </exist:result><br />

You can learn more about XQuery’s FLWOR structure here.

But eXist is more than just an XML store. By supporting XPath, XUpdate and XQuery Update, as well as custom extensions, eXist can be an application platform. I’m looking forward to working with XForms and Wicket in the future and I believe eXist will play heavily in that.

nick Entry exist, xml, xquery