[Exist-open] birth of an eXist baby

[Ron V. d. B. <ron...@ka...>]

Hi all,

I wanted to let you know that the test cases I promised are coming, now 
that the reason for their delay lies behind me. That reason has now 
materialized (virtualized?) at <http://vnsbrieven.org/VNS/>, a fully 
eXist-driven search interface for the first of a number of digital 
correspondence editions (finally) we'll be publishing. Apologies for the 
Dutch-ness of the whole thing; if you want an (incomplete) English 
language interface, add a "lang=en" parameter to the URL.

Any search/browse action will immediately explain my eagerness to a) 
switch to eXist-1.5 and try the sort index (provided I can drop Cocoon 
completely), b) have a quick means for faceted searching (now it's done 
using the technique explained at 
<http://rvdb.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/mimicking-faceted-searching-in-exist/> 
and eating most of the query time -- I'm very curious what the recent 
interest in Anne Schuth's implementation will yield -- 
http://markmail.org/message/waedfbplppcb5wvx). For the time being, some 
annoying bugs are holding me back as well; I promise to commit my tests 
soonish.

Also, any (private) advice on making this beast run faster would be most 
welcome. It's running in a Tomcat server, fronted by Apache, on a Linux 
box with a Quad-Core Intel Xeon L5506 processor, with 2,13GHz, 4Mb 
Cache, with 1Gb RAM. In view of the expanding collections we'll be 
indexing with eXist, we're still looking for answers where we could best 
spend our sparse money on: more powerful processors, or more memory. Any 
comments are much appreciated.

Kind regards, thanks for eXisting, and enjoy spring!

Ron