Oystein Reigem, AKSIS/WAB 2008-11-05

Re installation of eXist and the servlets for search

The contents of the two war files

Installation is done from two war files. Here is a description of the contents.

The war file for eXist

The war file for eXist contains a copy of the eXist XML database system. The system is - as far as possible - configured and ready to be fed data (contributions) from Talia. But some configuration must be done manually, after it has been installed.

(For those interested, details about how it was configured can be found in a document that describes how to change to a newer (different) version of eXist: ExistAndServletsInstallation_UpdateExist.

The war file for the servlets

The war file for the servlets contains source and class files for the following two servlets:

- FeedExist, used by a feeding service in Talia to feed eXist with data for one contribution at a time; and also to purge (clear, empty) the collection in preparation for a new feeding process.

- Search, used for macrocontribution (critical edition) search, "normal" search and media search.

The file might also contain servlets that are not currently used: NormalSearch (obsolete, replaced by Search), ServiceToFeedExist (obsolete, used until a feeding service in Talia was developed), XmlSearch (experiments).

The file contains source even if the class files would be sufficient.

These source and class files unsurprisingly reside in the classes subdirectory of the application.

The servlets application also contains some external libraries packed as jar files, properly placed in a lib subdirectory of the application.

The servlets application also contains some files from the Apache Commons library, that should have been packed as a jar file in lib, but in fact occurs in the classes as a complete directory tree. This causes no problem, though.

There is also a file web.xml that needs to be configured.