A round of applause

[Murray Altheim <mu...@sun.com>]

Tom Bradford wrote:
[...]
> I'm gonna say something personal now, and this is not directed to you
> specifically Dave, but to our user community.
> 
> For over a year, Kimbro and I have worked our asses of to develop
> dbXML.  There have been people who have contributed on occasion, and for
> that, we are very grateful, but for the most part, our user community
> has used the project, made requests and/or complained about it, but have
> left it up to the two of us to do something about it.  We're two people,
> and this project is a major undertaking, so you do the math.  Yes, it's
> a database, it's not something that's easy to write or maintain, but we
> don't need people who know the database internals to make valuable
> contributions.  We need documentation, we need better command-line
> tools, and better scripts for proper building and behavior on different
> operating systems.  These things aren't much to ask for from this
> community.

Speaking for both myself and our team here at Sun, we think what you guys 
have done is phenomenal, and hope that the visibility you'll get from 
Apache and from Sun's use of Xindice in our project will provide a wider 
audience of interest, and therefore a wider pool of resources to assist
in improving it. I expect that Xindice will be *very* widely used, once
people get wind of it. It fills in a big gap and allows for things like
persistent DOMs, long term storage of parsed content, etc. to really take
off. Tom and Kimbro, you've done some excellent work.
 
> Now that we're part of the Apache project, I suspect that we'll get
> increased contributions from those people already working on other
> Apache projects, but I fear that our user community will continue to do
> as you've done, which is use the project, make requests and/or complain
> about things, but leave it up to the Apache people to fix things.  One
> of the biggest criticisms of projects like Xalan and Xerces is that
> they're company-run and that nobody outside of those company's
> contributes to the projects.  Well, there are only three people working
> on Xalan, and I don't think they're turning people away from making
> contributions.  Niether will we.
> 
> We're at the start of something great.  We could make it great for you,
> our you can make it great with us.  It's up to you.

I've got a rendition of the ITIS zoological taxonomy as a topic map that 
is well over 150MB, which will end up in Xindice, accessed node-by-node.
I still need to get clearance from the Smithsonian, but that's a matter
of time. Come February, I'll also be using it in my Ph.D. project, which 
will link Xindice up with TouchGraph (at SourceForge) in displaying Topic
Map graphs of ontologies as used in research organization and authoring 
(that last part is essentially a technical rendition of the title of my 
thesis). And this will all be released in open source, of course. 

Xindice represents a major contribution to the XML community as well as
the community in general (eg., I think it will be used extensively in the 
academic and scientific communities), and if there was some way of calling
for a round of applause online, I'd do it -- you guys deserve it. It's 
well designed, it works (even given the glitches in transitioning from 
dbXML to Xindice and the concomitant parser difficulties), so that as you
say Tom, anyone complaining about a lack of documentation or any bugs is
well invited to contribute.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim, Staff Engineer          <mailto:murray.altheim&#64;sun.com>
Java and XML Software
Sun Microsystems, 1601 Willow Rd., MS UMPK17-102, Menlo Park, CA 94025

       Ernst Martin comments in 1949, "A certain degree of noise in 
       writing is required for confidence. Without such noise, the 
       writer would not know whether the type was actually printing 
       or not, so he would lose control."

Re: A round of applause

[Kimbro Staken <ks...@dbxmlgroup.com>]

On Thursday, December 13, 2001, at 01:19 PM, Steven Noels wrote:
>
> same here :-)
>
> I already used Xindice instead of Tamino in a hands-on XML & Databases 
> Lab.
>
> Great work folks! (and hi Dave - remember that DSSSL-course in Belgium?)
>
> On a sidenote: are there any plans on evaporating the SF mailing lists? 
> Me and
> my Outlook inbox-rules are getting pretty confused with emailaddresses by 
> now
> :-|

Yeah, I think we can shut them down at the end of this week. I'll post a 
message to this effect right now in case there are any stragglers.

>
> As I already mentioned in a private conversation with Tom & Kimbro, and 
> since
> I revisited Tom's website this week to drool over the alas unfinished GUI 
> app
> (http://www.tbradford.org/dbxml-screens.html) for dbXML, I'm still 
> wondering
> how and who we should convince to open up that source, too ;-)
>

I doubt that will happen, but you never know. In reality it shouldn't be 
all that hard to recreate it if anyone is up for the challenge.

> Regards,
>
> Steven Noels
> http://outerthought.org/
> (+32)478 292900
>
>
>
Kimbro Staken
XML Database Software, Consulting and Writing
http://www.xmldatabases.org/

RE: A round of applause

[Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Pawson [mailto:daveP@dpawson.freeserve.co.uk]
> Sent: donderdag 13 december 2001 21:00
> To: xindice-users@xml.apache.org; xindice-users@xml.apache.org
> Subject: Re: A round of applause
>
>
> At 10:42 13/12/2001 -0800, Murray Altheim wrote:
>
> >I've got a rendition of the ITIS zoological taxonomy as a topic map that
> >is well over 150MB, which will end up in Xindice, accessed node-by-node.
>
> Which is exactly the kind of application that attracted me to xindice.
> Fine for documents, but upwards of a few megabytes, and a memory
> based solution just won't hack it.
>
> OK, I give in.
> If I get it all working I'll help with documentation, docbook markup,
> submitted to the list. Please don't ask me to use CVS.
>   Again apologies for knocking the product.
> Regards DaveP

same here :-)

I already used Xindice instead of Tamino in a hands-on XML & Databases Lab.

Great work folks! (and hi Dave - remember that DSSSL-course in Belgium?)

On a sidenote: are there any plans on evaporating the SF mailing lists? Me and
my Outlook inbox-rules are getting pretty confused with emailaddresses by now
:-|

As I already mentioned in a private conversation with Tom & Kimbro, and since
I revisited Tom's website this week to drool over the alas unfinished GUI app
(http://www.tbradford.org/dbxml-screens.html) for dbXML, I'm still wondering
how and who we should convince to open up that source, too ;-)

Regards,

Steven Noels
http://outerthought.org/
(+32)478 292900

Re: A round of applause

[Dave Pawson <da...@dpawson.freeserve.co.uk>]

At 10:42 13/12/2001 -0800, Murray Altheim wrote:

>I've got a rendition of the ITIS zoological taxonomy as a topic map that
>is well over 150MB, which will end up in Xindice, accessed node-by-node.

Which is exactly the kind of application that attracted me to xindice.
Fine for documents, but upwards of a few megabytes, and a memory
based solution just won't hack it.

OK, I give in.
If I get it all working I'll help with documentation, docbook markup,
submitted to the list. Please don't ask me to use CVS.
  Again apologies for knocking the product.
Regards DaveP