User:Gimsieke

Gerrit Imsieke Managing Director le-tex publishing services GmbH http://www.le-tex.de/ http://publishinggeekly.com/ @gimsieke

Here because

* I like BaseX * I like the team

My first contact with BaseX was when I was conducting a system selection for a full text / XML search engine for a larger German publisher. Then, in 2009, BaseX' documentation was particularly sparse which made me consider other open-source solutions. But then, in 2010, the product became more and more mature. It outperformed another open-source XML database (with German roots, too) and it offered standards-compliant XQuery/Xpath full text search. However, there was a competing French offering that was also very reasonably priced (however not open source), performed equally well and also offered XQFT. But there was no client-server version of that product; the DB would have to be captured by a single process and no other process could ever read or write data. While I became tired of waiting for their REST interface (and didn't want to develop a server task myself), I switched to BaseX and got a REST interface together with client-server or standalone operations, as I prefer.

All of the systems I tested (there are some more) have their flaws, but I think it's simply astonishing how responsive the BaseX folks are, and how fast they are in fixing the remaining bugs, and in adding features that have been requested on the mailing list, and how mature their system has grown.

The aforementioned customer and we at le-tex are very pleased that commercial support will also be available, and I'm looking forward to developing innovative, open-source-based publishing repositories, workflows, and end-user products together with the BaseX team and with our customers in the publishing industry.

Finally I'd like to state that I'm not affiliated with the BaseX team or their commercial activities. (For full disclosure, I have to admit that I indirectly co-funded the development of BaseX – there are worse ways of spending German taxpayers' money than to fund utmost useful academic software initiatives.) They didn't ask me to write something polite here. Actually, it was the other way round: I didn't ask them whether I'm allowed to add my personal opinions to their Wiki.

But, hey, if you let users rant here, that's what you get ;)