If you are new to eXist, we recommend the following documents to get an overview of the most important features:
There are articles, tutorials and blog posts which may provide valuable information.
We recommend to have a look at the Quick Start first, then maybe continue to read about XQuery support, in particular eXist-specific extensions and features.
You can search the documentation as well as the XQuery function module library.
| Quick Start: | Getting started with eXist. |
| Upgrade Guide: | Upgrading eXist. |
| External Articles: | Links to external articles, tutorials, and blog posts. |
| Configuring Indexes: | How to configure indexes. (must read) |
| Deployment: | Alternatives for server deployment. |
| Developer's Guide: | Using various interfaces: XML:DB API, XML-RPC, REST, SOAP. |
| Security: | Creating/changing users, passwords, and resource permissions. |
| Server Configuration: | Configuring the server. |
| LEXA, the eXist Stack: | How to create an implementation of LEXA, the eXist stack. |
| Tuning Guide: | A few rules to consider when tuning the db and XQueries. |
| Package Repository: | Manage libraries & application packages (.xar) using eXist-db Package Repository. |
| Public Repository: | This instance of eXist XML Database comes with its own public repository for distributing packages to other eXist XML databases. |
| Ant Tasks: | How to automate tasks with Ant. |
| Atom Publishing Protocol: | Treat your collections as Atom feeds! Configure and access eXist using the Atom Publishing Protocol. |
| Backup and Restore: | How to backup/restore your database contents. |
| Configuring Triggers: | How to configure triggers. |
| JMX | Java Management Extensions (JMX) support. |
| Java Admin Client: | Using the Java client from the command line. |
| KWIC display module: | An XQuery module to easily produce a Keywords in Context (KWIC) output of search results. |
| LDAP Security Manager: | Configuring eXist to use LDAP for users and groups. |
| Lucene-based Full Text Index: | Apache Lucene integrated into eXist's XQuery engine. |
| Scheduler Module: | An optional module to schedule jobs. |
| URL Rewriting and MVC Framework: | Simple-but-powerful URL rewriting and redirection. Provides some support for MVC (model-view-controller) and servlet-based pipelines. |
| Validation: | Validate XML documents. |
| Versioning: | Versioning extensions. |
| WebDAV: | How to setup your favourite WebDAV application. |
| XACML: | XQuery access control. |
| XInclude: | XInclude support in eXist. |
| XForms: | XForms support in eXist (using betterFORM or xsltforms). |
| XProc: | XProc support in eXist (using xprocxq). |
| XQuery: | Current status, supported features, and extensions. |
| XQuery Update Extensions: | Extensions to update document fragments from within an XQuery. |
| XQuery Debugger | A debugging interface to XQuery code on the server. This is functional, but incomplete (the client side in particular). We used emacs and vi as our main clients during development. |
| eXist-db Developer Manifesto: | Guidelines for contributing to the eXist-db codebase. |
| Building eXist: | Compiling and building eXist, using the Subversion repository. |
| Code Review Guide: | Notes on reviewing code during development. |
| Developer's Guide to Modularized Indexes: | Describes how modularized indexes work through a use case. |
| Eclipse Setup Notes: | How to set up Eclipse to run eXist in debugging mode. |
| Log4J Logging Guide: | How use Log4J within eXist code. |
| Test Guide: | Perform XQuery tests with the XQuery unit test suite. |
| Production use Good Practice: | Best Practices for production environments. |
| Proxying eXist behind a Web Server: | How to proxy eXist behind various web servers. |
Further documentation can be found in the Wiki. Among other things, have a look at:
