EXist

eXist-db (or eXist for short) is an open source software project for NoSQL databases built on XML technology. It is classified as both a NoSQL document-oriented database system and a native XML database (and it provides support for XML, JSON, HTML and Binary documents). Unlike most relational database management systems (RDBMS) and NoSQL databases, eXist-db provides XQuery and XSLT as its query and application programming languages.

eXist-db
Original author(s)	Wolfgang Meier
Developer(s)	Pierrick Brihayne, Leif-Jöran Olsson, Adam Retter,[1] Dmitriy Shabanov, and Dannes Wessels.
Initial release	2000 (2000)
Stable release	6.3.0 / October 26, 2024; 9 months ago (2024-10-26)
Repository	github.com/exist-db/exist/
Written in	Java
Operating system	Linux, Mac, Windows
Platform	Java
Standard(s)	XML, XQuery, XSLT, XPath, XUpdate, XQJ, DTD, XML Schema, RelaxNG
Type	NoSQL DBMS
License	GNU LGPL v2.1.
Website	www.exist-db.org

eXist-db is released under version 2.1 of the GNU LGPL.

Features

eXist-db allows software developers to persist XML/JSON/Binary documents without writing extensive middleware. eXist-db follows and extends many W3C XML standards such as XQuery. eXist-db also supports REST interfaces for interfacing with AJAX-type web forms. Applications such as XForms may save their data by using just a few lines of code. The WebDAV interface to eXist-db allows users to "drag and drop" XML files directly into the eXist-db database. eXist-db automatically indexes documents using a keyword indexing system.^{[citation needed]}

History

eXist-db was created in 2000 by Wolfgang Meier.

eXist-db was awarded the best XML database of the year by InfoWorld in 2006.^[2]

The companies eXist Solutions GmbH in Germany, and Evolved Binary in the UK, promote and provide support for the software.^[3][4]

There is an O'Reilly book for eXist-db which is co-authored by Adam Retter and Erik Siegel.^[5]

Version	Release date	Changes
6.0.0	January 27, 2022	Fixes for Log4Shell vulnerability and breaking changes to bundled Apache XML-RPC libraries to resolve security issues.[6]
5.0.0	September 2, 2019	More than 1,400 commits including improvements to document and collection locking, migration of build system from Apache Ant to Apache Maven, support removed for running eXist-db in Apache Tomcat.[7]
4.0.0	February 14, 2018	New UserManager application, Cache Extension Module rewritten to use more performant Caffeine Java library, improvements to language search support, backward compatible with v3.[8]
3.0.0	February 9, 2017	Almost 1,500 changes including support for XQuery v3.1, and updated version of Jetty with HTTP/2 support. Java 8 is now a requirement.[9]
2.0.0	February 2013	Not backward compatible with v1. Changes to permission system to more closely follow UNIX permission model, web applications are stored in database rather than in webapp directory.[10]
1.0.0	October 2006

Supported standards and technologies

eXist-db has support for the following standards and technologies:

• XPath - XML Path language
• XQuery - XML Query language
• XSLT - Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations
• XSL-FO - XSL Formatting Objects
• WebDAV - Web distributed authoring and versioning
• REST - Representational state transfer (URL encoding)
• RESTXQ - RESTful annotations for XQuery
• XInclude - server-side include file processing (limited support)
• XML-RPC - a remote procedure call protocol
• XProc - a XML Pipeline processing language
• XQuery API for Java^[11]

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• BaseX - another Open Source Native XML Database
• CouchDB - a document-oriented database based on JSON