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RE: What niche is XQuery targeting?

• To: 'Jonathan Robie' <jonathan.robie@d...>, Michael Kay <mike@s...>
• Subject: RE: What niche is XQuery targeting?
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 10:33:12 -0600
• Cc: 'Burak Emir' <Burak.Emir@e...>, xml-dev@l..., 'Daniela Florescu' <dflorescu@m...>, davep@d..., 'Michael Champion' <michaelc.champion@g...>

I agree.   Some things are now more obvious than ever:

1)  XMLers tend toward the one syntax for all applications mindset. 
Yet alternative syntaxes are already a fact for areas of XML, RELAX 
NG and the Ontopia LTM (I think that's right) are two examples.  The 
Classic VRML syntax that is provided with X3D is another.  

2)  A binary for XML (whether one or multiple) is going to happen. 

Organizations and agendas aside, verbosity does matter in some 
applications.   Structure and the data model do matter.  Alternatives 
are being developed.

No size fits all. While it is also true that bad XML design has 
played a role in some perceptions of XML, it is also true that 
some of the optimization strategies of SGML were left behind. 
We can argue endlessly about the right or wrong of some of these 
decision in the minutiae, but overall, the results coming back 
from the field is that strategies for optimization are needed 
in some applications.   While the pundits debate, the production 
and implementation shops are moving forward to answer RFPs and 
BAAs some of which include faulty assumptions about the performance 
characteristics of XML systems and the niches where it is strong 
and weak.   It is not a panic situation, but a time to reassess, 
test assumptions, and then move on.   Condemming one approach 
or another without a use case is always a step backwards.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Robie [mailto:jonathan.robie@d...]
Sent: Thursday, December 09, 2004 10:21 AM
To: Michael Kay
Cc: 'Burak Emir'; xml-dev@l...; 'Daniela Florescu';
davep@d...; 'Michael Champion'
Subject: Re:  What niche is XQuery targeting?


I'm surprised by the continuing length of this thread. Isn't it obvious 
that both XSLT and XQuery have advantages, a reason to exist, and a market?

Why condemn one language because it does use an XML syntax, or condemn 
the other because it does not? Why condemn one language because it has 
FLWOR expressions but not templates, or the other because it has 
templates but not FLWOR expressions?

Jonathan

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