Thursday, June 14, 2012

Installer for xmlsh

Installers are pretty cool things.  They just do what you want and don't bother you with knowing how.  However they are also "black boxes" and tend to be dependent on things like having a GUI or a particular OS and you never know what they actually do under the hood.

For a product like xmlsh I never thought much about an installer.  Its so eazy, just unzip the distribution, set a few env variables, maybe chmod a file , oh and dont forget the pixie dust. By not having an installer I can ignore all that and give you the warm fuzzy feeling that I'm doing any magic dirty tricks behind your back.  Its just files right ?

But then its not always obvious.  An installer is, well, convenient!  So I've been looking into java installers and found a few.  But before spending any time on it I was wondering if my wonderful captive audience could make any suggestions.  Would an installer actually help anyone ? Were you daunted by the obscure installation instructions ?  Do you have a GUI always available (X windows or Mac or MS Windows) ?.  Does an installer feel more friendly or more opaque ?

Inquiring minds want to know !

Release 1.2.0

At long last many things came together and I have released xmlsh 1.2.0 along with updates for all the extension modules.   This is a really big release and I havent had time to document it all ...
But just to get you excited

xmlshui - a simple GUI for xmlsh
Named Pipes - xmkpipe creates named pipes for either text or XDM Streaming
XDM Streaming - using named pipes or implicit pipes (| with the set -xpipe)
Streaming enhancements - Some of the core commands now can stream unseralized XDM through named or implicit pipes - xsplit, xsql , marklogic:put ... more on the way.
Lots of bug fixes and test case improvements.
Marklogic extension improvements - XDM Streaming, dynamic URI construction using {seq} or {random}

This is a solid new release with extremely powerful new features and improvements on the core features.   I will be spending the next few weeks updating the docs to help explain how to make the best use out of the new features.