[xquery-talk] XQuery web APIs

Jason Hunter jhunter at xquery.com
Mon May 22 23:58:15 PDT 2006


Martin Probst wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm currently trying to add some basic functionality to use XQuery as a 
> web scripting language to X-Hive/DB. It's currently possible to use it 
> that way, but it's somewhat painful.
> 
> I've noticed that both MarkLogic and eXist DB provide some methods on 
> how to do this. I wonder if there is interest in collaboration, so that 
> at least some basic web functionality would be compatible between 
> applications? I've also written down some thoughts on this here: 
> http://www.martin-probst.com/archives/2006/05/16/xquery-as-a-web-scripting-language/ 

Sorry, I'm coming a little late to this thread.  Life's been really 
crazy the last week.

MarkLogic has supported web based deployment since its first release, 
and it's proven a very popular deployment vehicle.  We support calling 
into MarkLogic from Java/.NET/etc of course (using a wire protocol just 
like people would use JDBC).  But if you use XQuery as your primary web 
language you have the benefit of no impedence mismatch between the Java 
and XML.  In fact you have no impedence mismatch at all.  You can 
natively speak to your back-end (XML) and with your front end (XHTML or 
XSL-FO).  We have customers who used Java/Struts to front for their big 
MarkLogic project (playing it safe) and XQuery to front their smaller 
projects, and decided that the XQuery worked so well all future large 
scale MarkLogic efforts would use straight XQuery.

I definitely hope the meme spreads.  It works.  Perl is pretty good at 
text processing, and in the day it was king of the web -- but these days 
the web isn't just text it's XML (as XHTML), and XQuery is darn good at XML!

MarkLogic exposes web functionality in a simple manner fully conformant 
with the XQuery language by using server-provided built-in functions. 
They're documented at 
http://xqzone.marklogic.com/pubs/3.0/apidocs/AppServerBuiltins.html.

-jh-


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