[xquery-talk] Best engine for learning?

[Jason Hunter]

One of the first topics I'd like to cover is this: What's the best
XQuery engine to learn on?  I foresee this question being asked by a lot
of newbies here, and I frankly don't know the answer.  It feels like
there's an XQuery FAQ to be written and this is Question One, but no one
knows the answer yet.  :-)

Here's the criteria I'd use to judge:

1) The engine must be readily downloadable and available for extended
experimental use without a fee.  I see having to write to
sales at vendor.com for a copy as an impediment to experimentation.  A
30-day eval license is perhaps OK but it'd be better to have a license
which allowed extended non-deployment experimentation.

2) The engine must be rigorously faithful to the specs.  People
shouldn't learn bad habits.

3) The engine should be simple to setup and must be usable without a
large number of non-XQuery pieces.  The more unadorned the XQuery
feature, the better for learning.

4) The engine should have good, accurate error reporting.  I know how
frustrating "Nope, try again" errors can be.

5) The engine need not scale or be high performant.


In my own exploration, I've had good luck with Cerisent.  However,
Cerisent doesn't expose an evaluation download.

Ipedo XML Database 3.2 had some problems and so I'm now waiting for the
follow-on where I'm told all my problem reports have been fixed.

I've heard some good things said recently about Fatdog's XQEngine.  Has
anyone experimented there?

-jh-