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

["Andrew Welch" <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>]

> 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.

I did that and came to same conclusion... I added XSLT 2.0 support to
eXist in that you could browse to an XSLT to run it, just like how
eXist runs XQueries (a great feature that would be better if it was
XSLT instead of XQuery).  The transforms are "standalone" which means
they run with no input using "main" as the initial template.  The
input is fetched through the doc() function by calling an XQuery
through the same rest interface.

The problem was as you say, the query would have to be something like:

<countries>
  { for $x in //countries return
    <country>...

....eg it has to return a well-formed XML file as it get serialized
and then reparsed for the transform.

What I was really after was something like:

<xsl:variable name="countries" select="runQuery($getCountries)"
as="xs:string*"/>

so I get back a sequence of atomics from the db....

(my way of distinguishing a stylesheet that should be executed rather
than returned as-is (say for inclusion into another) was to make the
url pattern ".xslx" so specific.xsl could be executed by browsing to
specific.xslx, whilst allowing that to import common.xsl)

All of which led me towards Cocoon and then Orbeon...

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

I'm only a couple of days into it, but it appears you could happily
create your XHTML + XForms using XSLT 2.0 and that could be really
powerful.  Hopefully I'll understand a bit more on that today...

The thing is, with XRX because everything is done through REST don't
you encounter the same serialise/reparse issue?  Either XSLT 2.0 needs
to operate directly on the db, or you need an extension that can run
the query and return the nodes directly.  Or is this a non-issue...
going through the REST interface is perfectly fine?

As I say, I'm only a few days in so this might be nonsense, but
hopefully will prompt some discussion.


-- 
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/