[ANN] XQuery prototype

[Michael Rys <mrys@microsoft.com>]

We are please to announce that the XQuery prototype demonstrated at XML
DevCon in New York in April is now available for people to play with.
You can reach it either via a link from http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml
<http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml>  or direct via http://131.107.228.20
<http://131.107.228.20> . The prototype currently follows the  February
15, 2001 working draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery
<http://www.w3.org/TR/xquery> ) and will be updated to the next working
draft within weeks after the next working draft's publication.

The site allows you to formulate XQueries and a subset of a proposed
XQuery-compatible data manipulation language and parse and execute the
former, but currently only parse the later. Since it is provided via a
website, we provide a set of predefined XML documents and disallow the
use of user-specified documents for security reasons.

In addition the sites offers a a set of compliance tests that can be
used to check the syntax for the XQuery parser. Since the tests are
automatically generated based on the syntax, some of the statements may
not have meaningful semantics.

The implementation provides a list of known issues for the prototype
that lists the features that are not yet implemented and what issues are
still blocking. 

The goal of the prototype implementation is to follow the public working
drafts of the W3C XML Query working group while trying to avoid "inside"
knowledge about how something is supposed to work. Thus, you will find
some XQuery features not implemented because their implementation would
have required certain assumptions that are not documented in the
specification.
 
The prototype is implemented in C# and is currently only available via
the website. The prototype is not meant to give you any indication on
how and where XQuery will be implemented in Microsoft products. Its main
use is to familiarize the public with XQuery and to gather feedback and
requirements for both the W3C working group and our own implementation
effort. Future downloadable implementations of XQuery are planned for
later technology previews of some of the XML technologies. However no
promisses can be made w.r.t. timeframe or nature of these tech previews.

Enjoy!
Michael

PS: The site is currently down due to weekend maintenance and should be
back up on Monday.
--
Program Manager, SQL Server XML Technologies
mrys@microsoft.com, rys@acm.org
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