[xquery-talk] XQuery and Web 2.0
Jason Hunter
jhunter at servlets.com
Fri Apr 25 15:00:15 PDT 2008
Michael Kay wrote:
>> 2) What is it about XQuery that would stop you being able to
>> write your entire application in XQuery?
>
> The #1 reason I have found it hard to write significant applications in
> XQuery is the lack of polymorphism.
>
> If you want to write a simple query to do a single well-defined job, XQuery
> works very well. If you want to write an application capable of doing
> different tasks under different circumstances, with reuse of internal
> components, and variety in the input documents (or output documents), then
> the absence of any kind of polymorphism really starts to hurt.
>
> XSLT has two facilities - template rules and import precedence - that give
> it a major advantage once you are doing anything more substantial than a
> one-off task using a couple of hundred lines of code.
>
> I'd be interested to hear from people who have developed substantial
> applications in XQuery (like markmail) how they got around this problem.
Michael,
I've been thinking about your question a little bit. I think the
simplest answer is that we code with patterns like you use when writing
C code. A very high-level, declarative kind of C code. :)
The core MarkMail web app runs on ~5,000 lines of pure XQuery code. A
bit over 80% of that is in reusable libraries.
When writing the app we think in XML. The back-end is an XML store, the
front end is an XHTML browser, and the language bringing the two
together is XML-native. It's very convenient. I spoke on this topic at
XML 2007, as some on the CC list may recall.
http://markmail.org/collateral/xml2007.html
-jh-
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