Friday, July 30, 2004

XQuery

Jason Hunter (co-creater of JDOM) talking about what he considers the next "cool thing". XQuery is a standard language for querying XML, or anything that can appear as XML such as relational databases, HTML pages, SGML, anything with some structure...
  • XQuery is easier to read and write than XSLT
  • Better for jagged hierarchical data than SQL
  • Better than procedural access since the engine can optimise
Open source implementations are eXist, Saxon, Qizx/open and Qexo. Jason hopes it'll be an XSLT killer (at least for developers).