Advanced Topics - eXist: A NoSQL Database and Application Development Platform - page 485

to Apache Maven ) . In addition, many add-ons for eXist (such as the dashboard and
demo applications) are written in HTML, JavaScript, and XQuery. The documenta‐
tion for eXist is entirely authored in DocBook v5 .
You can use any IDE or other text editor that you wish to when developing eXist, but
for convenience IDE project files can be found for NetBeans, IntelliJ, and Eclipse
inside $EXIST_HOME .
Each of the IDE projects is configured to build eXist, but note that
the IntelliJ build configuration does not compile in the AspectJ
aspects that eXist uses for database and XQuery execution security
enforcement! Therefore, when eXist is run from IntelliJ it will run
with very few security constraints and will not be suitable for test‐
ing database operations.
Building eXist from Source
As eXist is an open source project, it is fundamentally important that anyone should
be able to download the source code and compile their own version of it. The devel‐
opers of eXist have gone to great lengths to ensure that the build process is simple for
all to use. Anyone can download the source code, compile it, and compare it with a
released version of eXist to make sure they are the same and that some nefarious per‐
son or organization has not interfered with the software, which enables transparency.
Another nice outcome of having an easy-to-use build system is that any user can
compile eXist, for the purpose of either having the latest and greatest version in
advance of the next release, or contributing fixes or features back as a developer.
The eXist source code repository was recently moved from its previous home on
SourceForge to GitHub . It is laid out using the git-flow scheme ; thus, all of the devel‐
opment for the next release of eXist takes place in the develop branch, which is the
default branch for eXist . The master branch represents the latest stable release of
eXist; however, to be certain which version of eXist you will be working with, it is
simpler to use the correct tag . At the time of writing, the latest tagged release of eXist
was eXist-2.1 . You will need to have Git installed if you wish to pull the latest
source code directly from GitHub; see http://www.git-scm.com to get an installer for
your platform. From the same website, there are also various GUI clients, such as
SourceTree.app and GitHub Client, available if you prefer a graphical interface. If
you are interested in reading further details on how eXist is developed and even
potentially contributing, see “Developing eXist” on page 483 .