Re: [Exist-open] Curious: History of eXist's "db/"?

[Wolfgang <wol...@ex...>]

Hi Joe,

> Is there a reason why eXist URIs begin with 'db/'?  Was there ever
> anything other than 'db/' at that level of the URI?  If not, isn't it
> extraneous?

The convention to call the root collection "/db" (instead of just "/") 
was first introduced by Xindice, the Apache project. I adopted this so 
people could use the same tools (e.g. Cocoon) with both dbs. This was 
quite important in the early days. The convention also made it easy to 
parse an URI like

xmldb:exist://localhost:8080/exist/xmlrpc/db/a/b/c

since you can easily find out what the collection path is by splitting 
the URI at /db. Today we could probably drop the /db in most interfaces 
(definitely in REST and WebDAV) or at least make it optional.

Wolfgang