SomedayMaybe

The backup utility should also include a copy of the relevant server configuration files (mainly conf.xml) into the created backup. Settings like page size, additional XQuery or index modules etc. are important.

eXist already provides a util:catch() function which basically corresponds to a Java try-catch.

The XQuery 1.1 draft also defines try-catch, but more closely integrated with XQuery. It should not be too difficult to implement this in eXist.

See http://www.zorba-xquery.com/doc/zorba-0.9.2/zorba/html/trycatch.html for some examples.

eXist's XQuery Update Extensions were implemented before the first W3C drafts were published.

The differences between the W3C recommendation and our implementation are not that big, though there are some subtle differences concerning the processing model. In fact, the recommendation simplifies a few issues.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery-update-10/

People often use the collection hierarchy to encode information, e.g. /db/year/month. Now, imagine you need to search all collections corresponding to the years 2001 to 2003. If the year isn't encoded in the XML docs as well, you need to use the path information. For example:

(collection("/db/2001"), collection("/db/2002"), collection("/db/2003"))/*

This works, but is not very convenient. It would thus be nice to have an extension function which behaves like fncollection, but accepts a regular expression against which the collection paths are matched.