Introduction - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 6

XPath? Luckily (for us), a professor of literature really needed XQuery support and
paid for its implementation. It was embedded in the product by 2005.
During 2005 eXist was going so well that Meier was able to quit his university job and
concentrate on eXist projects only. By that time some other programmers had come
on board, and they constitute what we now know as the original “core programmer
team.” In alphabetical order, they were Pierrick Brihaye, Leif-Jöran Olsson, Adam
Retter, and Dannes Wessels.
Up to 2006 the version number was kept to v0.xx, but in 2006 a real v1.0 was
released!
By this time, having previously only communicated via the Internet, the core pro‐
grammer team met live for the first time in 2007 in Versailles. One of the first things
they did was to check eXist against the official XQuery test suite, which subsequently
resulted in the current 99%+ compliance score.
The product kept evolving. A major improvement was replacing the existing scheme
for node identifiers with a much better one. As a result of that, limitations on XML
size and structure disappeared. Stability and transaction management were improved
and the Lucene full-text search engine added. From the original research/retrieval
tool, eXist evolved into something we really could call a native XML database .
The XRX (XForms, REST, XQuery) paradigm popped up as a way to create fully
XML-driven applications. eXist was among the first engines that made this possible.
It turned, slowly but surely, into a full-blown application platform .
With version 1.4 of eXist released in 2009, suddenly many more organizations were
using eXist in their production systems day to day. More development effort went
into stabilizing, fixing bugs, and improving reliability. With this, the first “settled
application” problems arrived: it became harder and harder to change anything
without breaking backward compatibility. Consider, for instance, eXist's XQuery
update support: an implementation of a draft version of the standard for writing
XQuery statements to update XML. Switching to the final standardized version is vir‐
tually impossible because it would break backward compatibility and existing appli‐
cations would stop working.
However, the development team did not stop working, and gradually the 2.0 version
as we know it came to life. Release candidates were made available throughout 2012,
containing a large number of major changes and additions to the previous versions:
• Behind the scenes, the XQuery engine and optimizer were improved.
• Support for (large parts of) XQuery 3.0 was added.
• The way the indexes work was redesigned to reduce lock contention, offer modu‐
larity, and improve performance.