Dr. Macro's XML Rants

At first I was happy when I found this post on Bill Trippe's blog this morning. But my joy turned to fear when I saw the name of the blog it pointed to, "Dr. Macro's XML Rants," and its official slogan:

All Tools Suck.
Some Tools Suck Less Than Others.

Lest the slogan's meaning not be abundantly clear, Dr. Macro even provides a lengthy post explaining exactly what he means by it.

Two questions sprung to mind:

• Is this a guy I want writing about MarkLogic?
  
• Would he place us in the first or second category?

In real life, Dr. Macro is Eliot Kimber of Innodata Isogen. This post discusses his experience integrating MarkLogic with XIRUSS-T, "a toy XML-aware content management system demonstrating how to do sophisticated management of versioned hyperdocuments with a focus on issues of import and export of compound documents."

Highlights from the post include:

• "So far I'm pretty impressed ..."
  
• "The documentation is clear and informative ..."
• "The Java API is logical and small ..."
• "My reports from colleagues who have used it more heavily is that it is very fast ..."
  

So I started out feeling pretty good. It soon got even better:

"One of the things I like about MarkLogic is that it is focused on a specific task, indexing and retrieving XML using XQuery. It doesn't also try to be a content management server or anything and MarkLogic seems to be clear about that, which is good."

Exactly!

The post goes on in considerable detail, including code, about how the integration went. Overall, it's my impression that Dr. Macro was pretty happy with his initial experience with our product. And from someone who appears to be a hardened critic, I'd say that's a pretty good thing.