This paper discusses methods by which software applications can interface to MarkLogic to retrieve, update and run queries against stored content. MarkLogic provides several access protocols (appservers) for this purpose which include HTTP, XDBC and WebDAV.
Traditionally, applications (software rather than people) have used the XDBC appserver protocol to access MarkLogic using either the Java or C# version of XCC as a connector. The author of this paper, while employed at MarkLogic, designed and implemented the XCC connector in Java and C#.
In this paper we advocate moving away from language-specific connectors like XCC and toward a language-neutral access model based on HTTP and using the design principles embodied in REST. There are many robust solutions available for implementing REST, both client and server side, that make it the preferred choice over XCC for application integration with MarkLogic.