Hi all,

Since a while now, BaseX 8.0 is on the agenda, and we are busy finishing all the features requested by you and ourselves.

As promised, there will be no changes in the database layout: You can easily move on to 8.0 without needing to migrate your existing data. However, we have decided to discard the old user management in favor of a more up-to-date architecture [1]. Here are some of the most prominent changes:

• An XQuery User Module allows you to manage users via XQuery • Permissions can now be manually edited (all credentials will be stored as XML) • Instead of md5, we now use salted sha256 hashes • Additionally, digest hashes are used for the new HTTP Digest Authentication, and for the existing client bindings (cram-md5 was dropped)

As a result, credentials of existing databases cannot be migrated to 8.0. Moreover, the existing language bindings will need to be updated. The changes are marginal, so it shouldn't be a big deal [2]. If you want to help us, we welcome you to update your favorite bindings to the latest standard!

And as you can guess… The latest snapshot is online [3].

Thanks for your attention, Christian

PS: Our BaseX Users Meetup has been confirmed. It will be attached to the XMLPrague conference, and it will take place February 13 in the afternoon [4]. More to come!

[1] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/User_Management [2] http://docs.basex.org/wiki/Clients [3] http://files.basex.org/releases/latest [4] http://lanyrd.com/2015/basex/