Re: [xml-dev] XML DB - anything new and interesting?

[Robert Koberg <rob@koberg.com>]

Hi,

First, I have received more off list replies than on. It seems a touchy
subject, unfortunately. More inline...

On Thu, 2008-07-10 at 11:41 -0700, Alessandro Vernet wrote:
> Rob,
> 
> 
> Robert Koberg wrote:
> > 
> > Are you comfortable using XQuery as your templating language? I am very
> > interested in using XQuery in an aggregation layer, not so much as a
> > templating language which is where the products (at least eXist and
> > MarkLogic) seem to want you to go.
> > 
> 
> I wouldn't recommend using XQuery as a templating language for web
> applications, and I don't think most people out there are using XQuery this
> way either. 

>From what I have gleaned, MarkLogic (and eXist - have not looked too
closely at Sedna yet) use (native) XQuery this way and seem to
discourage XSL. 

XHive supposedly has native XQuery *and* XSL. It seems strange to me
that native XSL support in an XML DB is not a well-known thing to a long
time XSLer (well, I actually had heard about it before but could not
find much info then and since forgot about it -
http://www.oxygenxml.com/archives/xsl-list/200611/msg00323.html). I have
not found much information about XHive's support for native XSL. I
realize I could use up a 30 day eval (which I have not done yet), but
feel a little put off for having to do so just to see if it actually
works. I would love to here from more people who have used this feature
in XHive.

I realize you can easily add support for XSL on top of those that do not
support it natively, but that loses appeal when you have convert the
XQuery result into something consumable by a transformation.

My biggest problem with XQuery is with recursive descent where content
can be nested n deep and some of it needs to be converted to something
else. typeswitch seems clumsy -- I don't think it is just me that
is spoiled by xsl:apply-templates. I would love it if java had
something like typeswitch (scala does), but I don't generally have many
cases to deal with there.

However, the folk I am dealing with do not have a background in XSL, so
maybe XQuery will be better/easier for them to learn.

> With XRX:
> 
> * You use XHTML+XForms as your templating language.
> * You use REST and XQuery to interface with services and XML databases.

What I am looking at it for is mainly content conversion, aggregation
and display with a minor emphasis on forms. Also, I am pretty
comfortable with javascript and don't like being abstracted too far away
from it. But there does seem to be a buzz going around and i will
probably look more deep into XForms.

best,
-Rob

> 
> Alex
> 
> -----
> Orbeon Forms - Web 2.0 Forms, open-source, for the Enterprise
> http://www.orbeon.com/
>