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  • Alain Couthures
  • Erik Siegel
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Software management for eXist

Real world application software management can be a nightmare: Keep track of your versions, deploy applications to other platforms (like the production servers) without forgetting anything, administration… Tools like SVN, GIT, ANT and the like alleviate some of the problems bit it still isn’t easy.

Now eXist introduced a new challenge: Your software is no longer “files on disk” but resides (at least partially) in the database where you can no longer use the file based tools like SVN. But you probably still want to do version management… Also: Moving your code to another platform means inserting it into the database at the other end.

Now all these tasks are IMHO quite boring. You don’t want to do all the necessary simple but time consuming steps over and over again. Especially because you can’t effort any errors in this area (have you ever forgot to include that crucial little file on a production release? I did…).

The solution is: Automate the procedures around version management and deployments. But how do you do that in an eXist environment? After fiddling around quite a bit I came up with a simple and elegant solution for all this that I would like to share with you.

Biography:
Erik Siegel works as a self-employed XML specialist. His career has involved many jobs—researcher, programmer, systems analyst, project manager, systems architect, consultant. During the past five years, XML crept in and it’s here to stay! His main customers are in publishing, and his XML activities include consulting, training, schema development, and programming. You can find more information about Erik and his company at www.xatapult.com.