[xquery-talk] [ANN] presenting XQuery - GSD language at MarkLogic User Group London Nov 24

[James Fuller]

On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 12:21 PM, Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch at gmail.com> wrote:
>> yes there are tons of apps out there, just look at all the very cool
>> stuff people are using MarkLogic for; some very revolutionary stuff
>> with the bulk being done in XQuery but perhaps is not shouted to the
>> rooftops that xquery is programming language in affect.
>
> Yeah lots of good stuff (fwiw, I did the BP app for them here in the
> UK... hopefully that counts as good)

sure does (I did the PoC!) ... say hi to Andrew.

>
> But... nothing the average project lead will be aware of.
>
>> There is probably no
>> killer app for SQL for example.
>
> Ok, this is a situation I've been in a few times now, given a new
> project you suggest using xquery and an xml database for the usual
> reasons.  The person making the decision isn't convinced, they know
> spring/hibernate, they've used data binding etc.  At that point, I
> really need to be able to refer them to some product or site and say
> 'look, these guys are using it'... otherwise its just the xml person
> advocating the xml solution.

sure we come into that situation all the time, usually after the
client has failed several times doing it with other technologies.

I love XML but lets be frank, this is just data wonkiness ... for most
of the people this is like asking them to love serialized b tree's to
hard disk. They care even less for these kind of situations... what
people love about data is the inferences they make from it.

We need to realize that people do not care about angle brackets like
we do, we need to focus on what you can do with the technology versus
getting bogged down in angle brackets.

IF that means we say the word XML Database less and say Database thats
fine (most xml databases I know of allow storage of text, binary,
xml), same goes for the term Data versus XML ... the xdm can
encapsulate a lot of structured/semi structured data ... ya we have
the oddball that is json but thats fairly trivial to address.

In my mind I would like to be able to say;

'XQuery is a language for data with polystructured data'

perhaps we derive a new language (or simpler syntax) and call it
something snappy like

'BigDataLang'

 or

'PolyStructData'

let the acronyms fly ....

Part of the statement is reality today ... how do we bring in other
data types ?

Perhaps we could bring in the notion of content-type to bear to help
identify these other data types ?

> Maybe the better way of saying all this is - what is the most widely
> known app/site that uses xquery?

a lot of the 'amazing' apps for MarkLogic are with government
customers and these are certainly not available for public review but
I can compile a list of viewable public stuff. Will get back to you
with a list of URLS for that.

Jim Fuller