eXist was founded in 2000 and has been continuously developed since, there are now about 12 core developers world wide and many others have contributed ideas and patches over the years. eXist is an Open Source native XML database featuring efficient, index-based XQuery processing, automatic indexing, extensions for full-text search, XUpdate support, XQuery update extensions and tight integration with existing XML development tools. The database implements the current W3C XQuery 1.0 recommendation. eXist provides a powerful environment for the development of databases and web applications based on XQuery and related standards. Entire web applications can be written in XQuery, using XSLT, XHTML, CSS, XForms and Javascript. XQuery server pages can be executed from the file-system or stored directly alongside documents in the database.