If you are new to eXist, we recommend to at least scan through the following documents to get an overview of the most important features:
Also, there are some 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 from previous versions. |
| External Articles: | links to external articles, tutorials and blog posts. |
| Configuring Indexes: | how to configure indexes (must read) |
| Deployment: | eXist supports different alternatives for server deployment. |
| Developer's Guide: | describes the various interfaces: XML:DB API, XML-RPC, REST, SOAP. |
| Security: | creating/changing users, passwords and resource permissions. |
| Server Configuration: | configuration options for the server. |
| Tuning Guide: | provides a few rules to consider when tuning the db and the XQueries |
| Ant Tasks: | how to automate tasks with Ant. |
| Atom Publishing Protocol: | how to configure and interact over the Atom Publishing Protocol to treat your collections as Atom feeds. |
| Backup and Restore: | explains how to backup/restore your database contents. |
| Cluster configuration: | how to configure cluster environment. |
| Configuring Triggers: | how to configure triggers. |
| JMX | support for Java Management Extensions (JMX) |
| Java Admin Client: | describes command-line usage of the Java client |
| 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: | optional module for scheduling jobs. |
| URL Rewriting and MVC Framework: | a simple, yet powerful module for URL rewriting and redirection with 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 enabled application. |
| XACML: | XQuery access control. |
| XInclude: | XInclude support in eXist. |
| XForms: | XForms support in eXist using xsltforms. |
| XProc: | XProc support in eXist using xprocxq. |
| XQuery: | current status, supported features and extensions. |
| XQuery Update Extensions: | eXist provides a number of extensions to update document fragments from within an XQuery. |
| XQuery Debugger | Since version 1.4, eXist provides a debugging interface to debug XQuery code on the server. The feature basically works, though it is currently still incomplete, in particular with respect to the client side. We used emacs and vi as our main clients during development. |
| Building eXist: | compiling and building eXist distributions, using the Subversion repository. |
| Developer's Guide to Modularized Indexes: | describes, through a use case, how modularized indexes work. |
| Eclipse Setup Notes: | a few notes on how to setup eclipse to run eXist in a debugging mode ... |
| Log4J Logging Guide: | a few notes on how use Log4J within eXist code ... |
| Code Review Guide: | a few notes on reviewing code during development ... |
| Production use Good Practice: | Points of Good Practice for using eXist in a production environment. |
| Proxying eXist behind a Web Server: | Details of how to proxy eXist behind various web servers. |
Further documentation can be found in the Wiki. Among other things, have a look at:
