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Monday, April 14, 2014

Vanguard here I come!

Some may have heard the news: I joined MarkLogic as of first of April. No joke! To be more precise, I joined the MarkLogic Vanguard team. The name for the team is derived from the military meaning:
“The vanguard is the leading part of an advancing military formation.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanguard
It is a rather popular word. Wikipedia lists the name being used for ships, aircrafts, and satellites. But also for company names, schools, sports, and political parties. Not to mention the numerous books, movies, and toys that have Vanguard in their name or title. Google actually suggests the term is derived from the French word Avant-garde, which only adds to the classiness of the word.

About the team: the team operates as international team supporting MarkLogic Sales Engineers around the globe to create compelling demos and proof of concepts. That puts the team close to the frontier. But the team also has the ambition to set an example, to not only make the demos look good, but also write compelling code. Even more reason it deserves such a name!

The team uses the RObust XQuerY (ROXY) Framework to accelerate their work. To describe it very briefly:

“Roxy is a lightweight XQuery application development framework. It includes:
  • Application configuration management
  • A lightweight mVC framework
  • A unit testing framework”
https://developer.marklogic.com/code
It is available on Github, and has become pretty popular among MarkLogic developers. No surprise, as it can accelerate development and deployment of a MarkLogic application enormously. If you take the cutting-edge ‘dev’ branch, you can even ‘capture’ an existing App Builder app, and start extending it with REST extensions very easily with the help of Roxy.

I am lucky to be on a team that includes the two biggest contributors of Roxy, not coincidently also its inventors: Dave Cassel, and Paxton Hare. For those interested to learn more about Roxy, make sure to check out the documentation, and all the blogs that are available online. There are plenty contributions and references on various personal blogs:
Most have been gathered on the wiki of Roxy:
https://github.com/marklogic/roxy/wiki/Tutorials
Stay tuned for more on my adventures at Vanguard. Looking very much forward myself!