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Excelon Corp. is beefing up its support of XML and Microsoft Corp.s .Net platform in new versions of its XML database engine and its IDE.
The Burlington, Mass., company last week announced the availability of XIS (Extensible Information Server) 3.12. XIS 3.12 adds support for .Net for interoperability between the .Net and Java 2 Enterprise Edition platforms, said Coco Jaenicke, XML evangelist at Excelon. XIS 3.12 supports XQuery, the XML query language, including XQuery use cases for better access to metadata in XML business documents.
Jaenicke said XQuery can be used to access metadata in XML documents, or, with the new release, “if you dont want to use XQuery, you can use Verity [Inc.] full-text search.” XQuery, a World Wide Web Consortium standard, is “the XML equivalent to SQL,” the primary access language for relational databases, she said.
Excelons announcement illustrates a shift occurring in the XML data storage market, analysts said.
“Instead of focusing on a general-purpose store for XML data, as these companies have done in the past, many XML storage vendors are moving to more purpose-built data stores that are focused on solving specific problems where XML data storage can add value,” said Ron Schmelzer, an analyst with ZapThink LLC, in Cambridge, Mass. “In the case of Excelon, they are moving toward the management of XML documents that are used in [business-to-business] interactions.”
Excelon last week also unveiled Stylus Studio 4.5, an update of its XML integrated development environment, or IDE, for building applications based on the XML and XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) standards. Stylus Studio 4.5 provides automatic generation of XSLT style sheets from HTML pages, Jaenicke said. In addition, the product features enhanced debugging, including new support for debugging .Net XSLT processors and open-source Saxon XSLT processors, she said. Excelons updated IDE includes an XQuery editor, XQuery debugger and XQuery processor to enable developers to build and debug XML applications.
Excelons Dynamic XML Engine, which lies at the center of XIS, also got a boost, Jaenicke said. The engine features a patented distributed caching technology that parses XML documents and stores the data at the node level, rather than the document level, giving users more granular access to the data and an easier way to update XML documents and Web services applications, officials said.