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Re: JSR 225 - XQJ: JDBC for XQuery

• To: "xml-dev@l..." <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: JSR 225 - XQJ: JDBC for XQuery
• From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
• Date: Wed, 11 Jun 2003 09:23:31 -0400
• User-agent: Opera7.03/Win32 M2 build 2670

Elliotte Rusty Harold says:

> It is time to remind ourselves of what James Gosling figured out in 1990. 
> A successful standard needs to wait until there's some actual experience 
> in the field being standardized. 
> <http://java.sun.com/people/jag/StandardsPhases/> You don't want to 
> standardize until you understand the problem domain, and have seen 
> multiple, competing possibilities."

Completely agree, especially with the reference to the old Gosling paper.
That is phenomenally prescient of what is happening in the XML standards
world!

> This JSR should be rejected in toto. None of this should be seen as 
> preventing Oracle and IBM from working on XQuery APIs. However, before we 
> establish any API as *the* XQuery API for Java, we need to have at least 
> a year or two's worth of actual production experience with different 
> XQuery APIs so we can learn what works and what doesn't, and what should 
> be standardized and what shouldn't.

Uhh, completely disagree!  First, look at the proposed schedule in
http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=225

"Expert Group Formed:
June 2003
Community Draft:
following the publication of the XQuery 1.0 Last Call Working Draft
(a second Community Draft might be issued after the publication of the 
XQuery 1.0 Candidate Recommendation)
Public Review Draft:
following the publication of the XQuery 1.0 Proposed Recommendation
Final Release:
following the publication of the XQuery 1.0 Recommendation"

There *will* be a year or two before XQuery becomes a Recommendation <duck> 
for XQJ and XQuery to inform one another and to benefit from each other's 
implementation experience.  Also, there is *plenty" of experience with 
proprietary XML DB APIs by the various XML DBMS vendors to draw on (maybe 
not for full XQuery, but for much of the subset of XQuery that ordinary 
mortals will actually use, aka XPath 1.0 <duck>).

In Gosling's terms, XML DBMS querying APIs appear to be just now entering 
the "window of standardization".  If the industry waits much longer, the 
political interest, i.e., the dominant vendors not wanting to inconvenience 
their customers by agreeing to standards that break existing applications, 
will become dominant and the window will have closed.

-- 
 

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