Corona Vision

Corona asks the question, What if we could provide the core value of MarkLogic to people who don't want to learn MarkLogic?

Corona answers the question by exposing MarkLogic as a web service: a set of generic endpoints to store, retrieve, query, and analyze documents. To you as a programmer using Corona, it looks like a web service backed by underpinnings you don't have to worry about. You can build apps against the Corona web service using whatever language you like -- with no change from how you develop already. You can keep your favorite IDE, web framework, unit testing tools, and all the rest.

How does Corona compare to what's already avialable? It fills a different need.

For example, MarkLogic offers XCC which lets programmers access MarkLogic from Java and .NET; but XCC expects the programmer to call their own XQuery residing within MarkLogic. Corona hides the XQuery. Corona also uses standard web service protocols (i.e. REST) so it does some things XCC can't, like work with any client language, any load balancer, and any caching proxy.

As another example, App Builder helps people build search applications using a wizard GUI builder; but App Builder aims only to deliver a certain variety of search application. Corona enables a wider range of applications by still maintaining a programmer-centric system.

Does Corona solve everyone's needs? No. XQuery and XSLT can do things that Corona won’t even try to do. However, for many use cases, Corona will be enough.

What about those use cases where Corona is nearly, but not quite, enough? For them, Corona will include (it doesn't yet) an extensibility mechanism whereby code can be dropped in to give Corona additional endpoints.

In the future we plan to develop a set of client-side libraries to make it easier to call the endpoints from some key languages, such as Java, C#, and Ruby. These libraries will wrap the endpoints in a way that keeps the client developer from having to think about making web calls. For today, though, the REST API is all that's built. You can learn about it in the [Corona Overview](Corona Overview).