[xquery-talk] MarkLogic using JSONiq for processing JSON ?

[Adam Retter]

Hi Daniela,

I am not sure if I need to, but I feel that I might need to defend
myself from your latest email.

Let me be clear, I personally wanted to participate in the XQuery WG.
I was not asked to do it by anyone in the eXist project and neither
did I do it to advance the eXist project. My sole purpose at the time
for enquiring about how I might join without working for a member
organisation of the W3C was because I felt that open source community
implementations of XQuery were unrepresented within the working group.
I felt that the average user of XQuery, that could not afford an
expensive implementation should also be represented within the WG.

I was lucky to be invited to join the WG and I am thankful for that.
Subsequently, I have paid out of my own personal pocket for every WG
meeting I have attended. I can only attend those in Europe as the
others further afield are beyond my means, and I have not always been
able to attend all in Europe due to cost. I work on an Open Source
project, almost all of the work I do is unfunded and I do it in my
evenings and weekends because it is interesting and I enjoy
contributing to the community. I did email the FLWOR Foundation about
possible funding on more than one occasion in the past but never
received a response from you. I have never been paid in any way for my
WG efforts or reimbursed any of my costs by any organisation (that
includes eXist Solutions).

What I am trying to say, is that I am not part of the WG to achieve
some sort of eXist-db domination plan, or for any sort of
machiavellian scheme. I attend the WG meetings because I genuinely
want to improve the language for its users, and for me that is more
important than what eXist, BaseX, MarkLogic, IBM, Oracle or any other
implementation wants. I also teach several XQuery courses each year
entirely free of charge, and again I fund this out of my own pocket,
my goal as always is to help the community. I think that XQuery is a
beautiful language that brings a great deal of freedom to its users.

I understand that you are unhappy with the design of XQuery 3.1, and I
am sorry to hear that; I know that you were deeply instrumental in the
original design of XQuery and spent many years working on the XQuery
WG.

All the best. Adam.

On 10 May 2015 at 00:41, daniela florescu <dflorescu at me.com> wrote:
> Adam, Ghislain,
>
>
> Com’ on. Stop running around the bush. I hate hypocrisy in technology.
> Reading your emails made me feel back in the communist era, with the perfect usage of a perfect wooden language.
>
> Since when “working well together” and “listening to each other” (what a wonderful world !!!!)…..: guaranteed a good technical result !???
> (Maybe they should have voted to see if Galileo was right or not …. wait, actually they DID…. OUPS.)
>
> Since when this guaranteed any logical result, and any good, usable tool for an industry !?
> (Web services would be the first thing that would jump to my mind as a graceful design of a “nice" community that all listened to each other
> … as a nightmare equivalent to XQuery 3.1)
>
> More often then not, such a “nice process” ends up in a horrible technical compromise which is good for no-one, and gets abandoned
> by industry VERY, VERY soon.
>
> ============
>
>
> You both prove my point: the design of XQuery 3.1 was done to “help” selfishly and with a very short term vision two-three companies (Saxon, Exist, MarkLogic), and with complete
> disregard to the big picture of the needs of querying and processing semi-structured data in the industry (which includes both XML and JSON).
>
> As for the choice between solving:
> (a) XSLT maps and arrays (estimated # use cases in the Ks, includes all three eXist, Saxon and MarkLogic) and
> (b) querying JSON (downloads of Mongo+Cassandra+Cloudera+Spark+Couch+…    in the tens of millions of downloads…)
>
>
> (let alone the comparison in the total sales number…)
>
> ……...very intelligently, XQuery 3.1 decided to totally ignore the millions of use cases of Cassandra+Mongo+Cloudera+…., and “serve” Saxon and eXist,
> and antagonize all those millions of use cases that need JSON query processing.
>
> Again.
>
> Great.
>
> Thanks for your “contribution" to the industry.
>
>
> Dana
>
>
>
>> On May 8, 2015, at 4:21 AM, Adam Retter <adam.retter at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> No, all the arguments were all technical
>>>
>>> Getting agreement on all these points was a very lengthy process with much heated argument. Although the decisions made were not always the ones I personally advocated, I think the final language works well.
>>
>> Absolutely! Whilst I am more of an occasional frequenter and
>> contributor to the XQuery WG, having seen the level of collaborative
>> work and perseverance that that has gone into adding Maps and Arrays
>> to XQuery, I can say that I am impressed.
>>
>> From my perspective, it was a difficult process, but everyone worked
>> hard together and the technical arguments were always foremost. Whilst
>> working under the constraints of backwards compatibility and creating
>> a cohesive data model and language, I think the result speaks for
>> itself. Certainly many of eXist's users are very happy with the new
>> Maps and Arrays work in XQuery 3.1 and we frequently receive positive
>> feedback on this.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Adam Retter
>>
>> skype: adam.retter
>> tweet: adamretter
>> http://www.adamretter.org.uk
>



-- 
Adam Retter

skype: adam.retter
tweet: adamretter
http://www.adamretter.org.uk