Kimbro Staken has announced the "0.2 release of the dbXML Core Edition", a XML Database Application Server recently rewritten in Java (from C++) and available under a LGPL license at SourceForge.

Seeking a balance between open source and commercial software distribution, dbXML is splitting their offer between:

DbXML Core edition: a data management system designed specifically for collections of XML documents. It is easily embedded into existing applications, highly configurable, and openly extensible.

DbXML Enterprise: will feature a suite of functionality geared specifically toward client-connectivity and business logic encapsulation. Some of this functionality will include CORBA services, management tools, and JDBC(TM) drivers for legacy connectivity.

Tom Bradford explained that the move to Java has been made for practical reasons and also to open dbXML to more developers and that connectivity to other languages will be achieved through Corba:

About two months ago, we decided that our developing this project in C++ would only hurt the growth of dbXML in the long run. We had a lot of code at that time already written in C++, but dealing with memory management, the DOM, and a bunch of other things in C++ was a headache that we didn't feel we needed to deal with.

It's apparent that XML has really found its home in the Java world, and by scrapping all of the C++ code, and rewriting it in Java, we've opened up the project to a lot more XML developers. But don't despair, there is a CORBA layer for dbXML, which makes it interoperable with many languages. We've already got it working with Python and C++, and I'm sure someone will get it working with Perl and C at some point in the future.

Still short of documentation, the distribution ships with a PDF document giving some information about the architecture of the product.

Other story:

• XML database server dbXML becomes a commercial venture