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Hmm. What about XSLT (aka MSXSLT at the time).
Running and hiding :-)
Seriously, Tom's argument to some extend seems to be that sometimes
technology should be developed first in the market place and then be
standardized. I tend to agree with that if lower levels of
interoperability are accepted by the market place (e.g., SQL) or the
language is simple and small enough and can be easily evolved. (C, APL)
It does not work well if the format requires a high-level of interop
such as XML. The question is where XQuery fits in in that scale. Also,
programming language compilers are normally a much simpler component
with a larger audience than declarative query languages.
I personally (not an official Microsoft or XQuery WG position) think
that the initial work on XQuery at the W3C was good and necessary (we
needed alignment with XPath and XSD for example), but that the WG has
too high expectations/requirements on interop and should have left more
away and implementation-defined and get a spec released earlier with
less (e.g., do we need all the functions? Do we really need schema
context or implicit validation on construction (both now gone)? can the
static type system be allowed to be more implementation-defined?). But
hindsight vision is 20/20.
Note that larger vendors often refrain from implementing something that
is in flux. SOAP was different that there was some market agreement and
the spec was not going to change much. XQuery evolved for a while
dramatically, and even now, many companies may have internal
implementations but do not ship anything that they recommend users to
use in production.
My expectations are that once we and other larger companies ship XQuery
support for enabling new capabilities (for example XQuery to query XML
datatypes), you will see more adoption of the language. Also note that
as with many of the mentioned languages, adoption inside academia is on
the up-take. Thus more people will graduate knowing XQuery and thus be
less intimidated by FUD spread by the "purely relational" crowd.
Best regards
Michael
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@datadirect.com]
> Sent: Monday, December 13, 2004 2:23 PM
> To: Tom Bradford
> Cc: Dare Obasanjo; Tim Bray; Daniela Florescu; XML Developers List
> Subject: Re: [xml-dev] What niche is XQuery targeting?
>
> Can you provide some examples of successful XML standards
> that gained significant market share before the standard was released?
>
> I rather suspect standards are more important in the modern
> XML world than they were in the early C++ or SQL world. But
> beyond that, my memory doesn't match yours for C++. In 1991,
> C++ conferences were rather intimate affairs, but we had
> started to get to the point that you actually could write
> code that worked on many platforms. We supported lots of
> platforms with POET in 1991 - you needed conditional
> compilation, but mostly for operating-system dependent
> things. The popularity of the language really picked up at
> that point. So I do think that the ability to write portable
> code was very important for C++. I wasn't an early SQL
> hacker, I can't say much about that history.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Tom Bradford wrote:
> > Let's paint a broader picture. I don't think we're talking
> about market
> > adoption of a standard, we're talking about market adoption of a
> > technology. A good example: C++ was finally standardized
> in 1997, but
> > was already gaining rapid momentum shortly after being
> created in 1985.
> > C++ gained an audience because it addressed its target audiences
> > problems, for the most part, appropriately, and they overwhelmingly
> > didn't care whether or not it was standardized, or even had
> > implementations that were compatible with each other. We
> can make the
> > same case for SQL.
> >
> > Technologies don't become adopted because of their
> standards status,
> > they're adopted on their own virtues, or because Microsoft
> tells you
> > that you have to adopt them. XQuery has not been finalized
> for years,
> > yet it hasn't changed all that much from the 10k ft view,
> making it a
> > perfectly good candidate for implementations, even moreso
> than SQL or
> > C++ were in their early years. The implementations are there, and
> > they're mostly good, so now the question to ask is why
> aren't people
> > using them in the numbers you were expecting?
> >
> > --
> > Tom Bradford - Virtuoso Technology Evangelist
> > OpenLink Software: http://www.openlinksw.com/
> > Personal Web Log: http://www.tbradford.org/
> >
> >
> > Jonathan Robie wrote:
> >
> >> Tom Bradford wrote:
> >>
> >>> On the contrary, I think the fact that it's now December
> of 2004,
> >>> and we've yet to see a rec of XQuery 1.0, even though it's been
> >>> touted as the de-facto successor in XML query languages for years
> >>> leaves ample room for comparison. Any language that has
> been built
> >>> up on that much hype for so long, yet is not finished, is
> open for
> >>> comparison to any other, even if it hasn't found
> widespread acceptance.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> I think that market adoption of a standard is hugely
> influenced by
> >> (1) a completed standard, and (2) good implementations of that
> >> completed standard.
> >>
> >> If you think a fair comparison can be made without taking
> these into
> >> account, I guess we disagree.
> >>
> >> Jonathan
> >>
> >
>
>
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