XRX/Application Modularity

Motivation

You want to be able to package and reuse XRX applications.

Method

We will use the collection structure of native XML databases to package XRX applications.

Our XRX Application framework uses the following conventions:

• All applications are placed in a common collection called apps. This is similar to the "/Applications" folder on a Mac(TM) or the "Program Files" folder in Microsoft Windows(TM).
• Each application has a collection of its own within the apps collection. We use REST-friendly application names that have only lowercase letters and dashes. For example a tool that manages organization business terms might be located in a collection called "/db/apps/terms". Databases that host multiple organizations might store each application collection in a separate apps collection for each organization. For example "/db/org/my-company/apps"
• All user-manageable data that is contained within the application is contained with a "data" collection within the application collection.
• XQuery functions that are common to multiple applications should be stored in a sibling folder to the "apps" collection. This allows each application to use relative module imports so that applications can be quickly re-installed on other sites.