[xquery-talk] XQuery and Web 2.0

John Snelson john.snelson at oracle.com
Fri Apr 25 12:33:17 PDT 2008


Hi Peter,

I'm interested in your use case, can I ask a couple of questions?

1) Does the application usually deal with incoming and outgoing 
XML/HTML, or is that the exception?

2) What is it about XQuery that would stop you being able to write your 
entire application in XQuery?

John

Peter Coppens wrote:
> Fwiw...
> 
> Two years ago I switched from a company that implements XQuery to a 
> company that develops your fairly typical web applications (I know...why 
> would you want to do that :) )
> 
> Anyway , because I do like the language a lot I try to use it wherever 
> it makes even a little sense but to be honest, the cases where it does 
> make sense are really fairly limited in my case (no idea whether that is 
> typical)
> 
> In general I find it very difficult to integrate XQuery in the complete 
> application stack. To a certain extent it is a bit like the 
> object-relational mismatch on steroids.
> 
> For *a lot* of needs it is far easier to just shut down your brain and 
> crank out a couple of hundred lines of DOM code and the go on with the 
> real problem.
> 
> As said...fwiw,
> 
> Peter
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 25 Apr 2008, at 08:42, bryan rasmussen wrote:
> 
>>> solve.
>>>
>>> The top major complains were:
>>> (a) is too complicated to understand (tutorials, books !?)
>>
>> I agree, when I look at the XQuery stuff I have it seems to have a
>> strong academic flavor, as well as a focus on XML based problems.
>>
>> examples:
>> 1. lots of focus on the 'books' problem, like if I have a list of book
>> authors listed how do I deal with it. That might have an interest to
>> typical document people, but I think it would be more useful if a book
>> was completely focused on - use XQuery to manage the various flavors
>> of syndication now around, show querying a large base of different
>> versions of RSS and Atom it might be useful to the Web 2.0 folks.
>>
>> 2. FLWOR is an unhelpful acronym. It seems off-putting. Don't know
>> why, but if I try to think about it divorced from its meaning it just
>> strikes me as a problem. It's an aesthetic feeling.
>>
>>
>>> (b) there are no good example of how to use it  (repositories of open
>>> source useful XQuery modules !? CRM, etc)
>>
>> part of that would be solved if the examples in tutorials were
>> basically all using things that are more useful for web programming as
>> opposed to just XML processing. I think this is one of the reasons I
>> find eXist interesting, because lots of what they do seem essentially
>> focused on meeting the needs of web programmers in one way or another.
>>
>>
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Bryan Rasmussen
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk at x-query.com
>> http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk


-- 
John Snelson, Oracle Corporation            http://snelson.org.uk/john
Berkeley DB XML:            http://oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/xml
XQilla:                                  http://xqilla.sourceforge.net


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