eXist

Chapter 14. Tools

Working with eXist often means working with various tools that help ease development. For instance, writing code is far easier in an integrated development environment (IDE) like eXide or oXygen than hacking in Notepad or vi. Other tools, such as the eXist Ant extensions, are useful for automating tasks.

This chapter explores some of the common tools that you can use to work with eXist. Undoubtedly there are many more, so be warned: our preferences are shining through!

Java Admin Client

eXist comes with a small program called the Java Admin Client. It allows you to do maintenance work on the database like backup and restore, imports and exports, checking and setting properties, creating collections, and more. It’s a standard Java Swing GUI application and its functionality speaks mostly for itself.

Note

The Java Admin Client has a lot of functionality hidden underneath right mouse-clicks. Try this if you can’t figure out how to do things.

The Java Admin Client already popped up in this book in several places. See, for instance, The Java Admin Client and Chapter 8.

eXide

One of the additional packages you can install in your eXist installation is eXide (Figure 14-1). eXide is a complete development environment for working with eXist. You can do things from editing a single file (as long as it’s stored in the database) to creating and maintaining complete applications.

Figure 14-1. The ...