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At 05:15 PM 12/24/2001 -0800, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
> > At 11:13 AM 12/24/2001 -0800, Jeff Greif wrote:
> > >One issue not addressed is what progress has the XQuery WG already made on
> > >update syntax. If they have already done substantial preliminary
> work, but
> > >have some perceived need to produce an interim XQuery spec before that's
> > >ready for release, it may be a duplication/fragmentation of effort to
> > >produce a competing spec in an Oasis TC, and take just as long.
> >
> > In fact, this is just the case. Several members of the XML Query WG
> > developed a proposal, and several vendors are implementing variations of
> > this proposal. This proposal was the basis of a presentation that I gave at
> > XML 2001 in Orlando this Fall.
> >
>
>For those of us that were not able to attend XML 2001, is there any material
>related to your presentation online such as PDFs, Powerpoint slides or similar
>material? I am primarily curious as to whether this update proposal is similar
>to the grammar on the Microsoftr XML demo site at
>http://131.107.228.20/grammar.html or more like the proposal from the UW
>database group at
>http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zives/research/updatingXML.pdf or something
>completely different.
I can send a PowerPoint and some sample queries. I hope to start work with
other companies in January to produce an updated proposal. The Microsoft
implementaton and ours are *very* similar, which is not surprising, since
we worked with Microsoft, IBM, and Crossgain on the original proposal from
which our implementations are derived. I think that we can iron out the
differences and create one joint proposal.
>Speaking of which, besides Microsoft's XQuery demo at http://131.107.228.20
>and GoXML (http://www.xmlglobal.com/xmlgupdate/new.html), what are the other
>implementations of XQuery out there and more importantly where and when do you
>think we are going to see more the implementations of XQuery that contain the
>update features you mention?
Here's my current list:
Software AG's QuiP
http://www.softwareag.com/developer/quip/
Microsoft
http://131.107.228.20
Lucent
http://db.bell-labs.com/galax/
GMD-IPSI
xml.ipsi.fhg.de/xquerydemo
X-Hive
http://www.x-hive.com/xquery
XML Global
http://www.xmlglobal.com/prod/db/
SourceForge
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xquench/
Fatdog
http://www.fatdog.com/
Kawa-Query - compiles to Java byte code
http://www.gnu.org/software/kawa/xquery
Openlink
http://demo.openlinksw.com:8891/xquery/demo.vsp
CL-XML (Common Lisp)
http://homepage.mac.com/james_anderson/XML/
Kweelt (Quilt)
http://db.cis.upenn.edu/Kweelt/
I know that the implementations from Software AG and Microsoft both contain
update. There may be others. There are certainly others in development.
>Why is the quick release of XQuery so important?
The XQuery WG was chartered in September of 1999. I would not necessarily
say that 2 1/2 years is "quick" in Internet time, though it does, of
course, take time to develop things right. Since companies and universities
are funding the manpower to develop the specification, we do need to be
able to finish specifications in a time frame considered reasonable by the
people who are volunteering to pay the people to do the work.
>Are there really that many
>businesses that stand to lose that much money if they have to use XPath for a
>few more months instead of jumping to XSLT-with-different-syntax aka XQuery?
XSLT is not strongly typed, is not set up for function libraries, and has
been rather difficult to optimize for large repositories. I don't think
that the differences are merely syntactic. And yes, I think that a number
of database companies think they are likely to lose money if they do not
have XQuery in their upcoming product cycle.
>I wouldn't discount a seperate OASIS TC yet unless it was shown that the W3C
>was making concrete moves towards adding updates to the langauge in the near
>future as opposed to _considering_ it for some nebulous future release of
>XQuery which would be meaningless since vendors would have come up with their
>own extensions to XQuery that support updates and some of them may not drop
>their implementations once the W3C recommendation is finally made (HTML all
>over again).
I would say that keeping pressure on the W3C to have updates in XQuery is
the right way to go. I think that the W3C is likely to be responsive, and
there are certainly vendors on the WG that want to make this happen. Send
feedback to the following mailing list:
www-xml-query-comments@w3.org
Remember that nobody is obligated to respond to anything on xml-dev, so our
comments list is the right place to post if you want to put pressure on us.
Jonathan
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