Presentation by Andrew Nagy at Code4Lib 2007 in Athens, GA. Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library has longed for a beautiful pig; however, we determined in early 2006 that pigs were only good at searching for truffles, so we decided to build our own OPAC. After developing our own custom Digital Library from a Native XML Database, we quickly appreciated the ease of development with XQuery and XSLT. We then launched full speed ahead into the development of a new OPAC from scratch using XML technologies and MARCXML. This presentation will describe the process of choosing an NXDB and optimizing it for large data set performance. Developing searches that take about 2 minutes to process and optimizing them down to about 2 seconds. I will also describe the development processes of the OPAC interface including the AJAX features we have implemented. I will share our success stories and our failures.

4. Application Layout

5. Application Layout Application Controller User Interface HTML, XUL, WML, RSS, etc File System eXist Metalib XServer SOLR ILS Driver Data Controller

18. eXist in Production In Production Since August 2006 top - 16:36:36 up 148 days, 3:11, 0 users, load average: 0.05, 0.01, 0.00 Tasks: 124 total, 1 running, 123 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.9% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 8162268k total, 7070344k used, 1091924k free, 272152k buffers Swap: 16779852k total, 372296k used, 16407556k free, 4304256k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 27996 root 16 0 416m 162m 2928 S 0.0 2.0 0:04.49 java 16478 daemon 16 0 164m 46m 11m S 0.0 0.6 0:22.67 httpd 17203 daemon 16 0 155m 37m 11m S 0.0 0.5 0:09.72 httpd 25279 root 19 0 362m 35m 2508 S 0.0 0.4 0:05.17 java 17213 daemon 16 0 144m 26m 11m S 0.0 0.3 0:04.25 httpd 17233 daemon 16 0 143m 25m 11m S 0.0 0.3 0:01.46 httpd 17242 daemon 16 0 142m 24m 11m S 0.0 0.3 0:00.54 httpd 27445 root 16 0 361m 22m 2496 S 0.0 0.3 0:04.55 java 17235 daemon 16 0 139m 21m 11m S 0.0 0.3 0:00.54 httpd 17252 daemon 16 0 138m 21m 11m S 0.0 0.3 0:00.28 httpd 20314 root 20 0 364m 20m 1308 S 0.0 0.3 0:04.60 java 17231 daemon 15 0 137m 19m 11m S 0.0 0.2 0:00.36 httpd 17241 daemon 16 0 133m 15m 10m S 0.0 0.2 0:00.06 httpd 17236 daemon 16 0 133m 14m 10m S 0.0 0.2 0:00.02 httpd 22294 root 16 0 133m 14m 10m S 0.0 0.2 0:00.79 httpd

29. Questions?