[XQZone General] Feature request

[Ron Hitchens]

Raffaela et al,

    We obviously want you to do everything in CIS. :-)

    For the record, xdmp:email() will be officially supported
in 2.2 and the SMTP bug to which you refer has been fixed as
a part of making xdmp:email() a supported function.  We should
have mentioned this in the 2.2 Preview.

    Beyond e-mail, your core question is really about integration
with other software components in the enterprise. This is a topic
of definite interest to us. Two of the approaches under discussion:

    1) Providing outbound network-level connectivity to give you
       ways to access external resources (like web services, web
       servers, etc.)

    2) Supporting some form of external function that can be
       invoked from within XQuery but implemented in some other
       language (such as Java).

    There are pros and cons from an implementation, design and
stability standpoint to each of these approaches.  I personally
am an advocate of more integration options because it opens up
so many new possibilities.  But we need to make sure that we're
focussing our resources on the functionality that will deliver
the largest value for our customers.

    Please let us know how important this sort of product enhancement
is to you, whether you have a strong point of view on either of the
two approaches, how each of them might affect your design decisions
and if you believe they would influence purchasing decisions for your
company.  Based on our product development cycle, this is a good time
to speak up.

    Thanks for your feedback.

On Aug 27, 2004, at 10:17 AM, Raffaele Sena wrote:

>
> I looked at the new features of 2.2 and the list is pretty impressive.
>
> But there is still one feature that I would like to see.
>
> While I understand that for big installations it may make sense to 
> have dedicated systems used to serve static content, a central data 
> repository and a cluster of application servers, for smaller 
> installation I think that CIS would suffice. It can serve static 
> content (can anybody comment on the performance in this case) and 
> XQuery combined with the array of available functions is powerful 
> enough to write pretty complex applications.
>
> But I didn't see any mechanism to "extend" this system and add that 
> extra function specific to my application.
> I mean, right now CIS is very powerful but it is relatively "close". I 
> can write applications that access the data repository, can access the 
> local filesystem and external URLs, but I cannot "communicate" with 
> other part of my system.
>
> For example, one simple thing I would like to do is to generate an 
> "e-mail" when a certain event occours (I added some entries to one of 
> my repositories). Right now I don't think I can do that (ok, I just 
> pretend I didn't see the undocumented "email" function , since I can't 
> seem to be able to reconfigure the STMP server :) But if it's not an 
> e-mail it may be a pager or SMS or I need to notify some other server 
> running on my host.
>
> I could do all this if I use CIS as my "content repository" and access 
> it through the API via some other server (java servlet, PHP pages, 
> etc.) but this kind of defeat my initial assumption that, at least for 
> relatively small installations, I can use CIS as my only server (and I 
> can use to to generate full fledged HTML pages that don't require any 
> extra processing).
>
> Are these assumptions wrong and you see CIS more as a "service" 
> queried by a different front end ?
> If not, are you addressing CIS "extensibility" and how ?
>
> Thanks,
>
>   Raffaele
>
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---
Ron Hitchens {ron.hitchens at marklogic.com}  650-655-2351