Annemarie,
I would suggest that you look into
greenstone
http://www.greenstone.org

Rick




-----Original Message-----
From: Clay Redding [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2003 2:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: XML delivery software -- best choices for Apple/Unix?


Hi Annemarie,

I'm not sure if anyone responded to this or not, as I've been on
vacation.  If they have, please pardon any duplication.

Since OS X is based on BSD, most anything that will run on Linux or Unix
should work.  Unfortunately I'm not aware of any free turnkey
solutions.  Proprietary solutions should still build properly on OS X,
though.  It sounds like your XServe will ship with Apache Tomcat and
Axis for web services.  With this setup, you could add Apache Cocoon for
further delivery of the XML, HTML, etc., if you like.  If I'm not
mistaken, eXist [http://exist.sourceforge.net], which is an open source
XML database, sits nicely over Cocoon which would allow for search and
retrieval.

I had heard rumors (as of a year ago) that Cocoon didn't work very well
with larger, document-centric XML files (like EAD).  That may have
changed.  If you don't want to go with Cocoon, I'm simply using Tomcat
with some simple Java servlets (Saxon 7.5 and FOP 0.20.5) for
transforming to HTML, PDF, etc., at run time.  If you prefer the static
approach, Tomcat can work as a regular web server as well.  This should
run on OS X as nicely as it does on my Linux Mandrake box.

Some OS X proponents have gotten the Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML
[http://www.sleepycat.com/products/xml.shtml] up and running, but I have
found its performance a little too slow, especially for larger EAD files.

Hope this helps,
Clay

Annemarie van Roessel wrote:

> Fellow EADers-
>
> The Ryerson and Burnham Archives at the Art Institute of Chicago is
> researching software solutions to deliver our EAD 2002 finding aids
> in both native XML and transformed HTML, with good searching/indexing
> functionality. We've looked through the EAD implementor write-ups
> online, but since they're not dated, it's hard to tell what's most
> current, especially for those of us running on a Mac OS X (BSDUnix)
> platform. We've also searched the EAD listerv archives without a
> great deal of luck. Our hardware will be an Apple Xserve G4, running
> MacOS X Server (unlimited licensing) with Apache for web services.
>
> If anyone has any suggestions about the best delivery and indexing
> software to use for this platform, we'd be very grateful for your
> opinions. Ideas about the most efficient way to offer transformed
> HTML in this environment are also welcome. Keep in mind that we have
> limited technical support and not a lot of time for in-depth
> programming on our end, so solutions that are close to running
> out-of-the-box are ideal.
>
> Thanks,
> Annemarie
> --
> *************
> Annemarie van Roessel
> Lead Project Archivist
> Ryerson & Burnham Archives
> The Art Institute of Chicago
> 111 S. Michigan Avenue
> Chicago, IL  60603-6110
> (312) 443-3618 ph.
> http://www.artic.edu/aic/libraries/rbarchives/rbarchives.html