XQuery as a general data processing language WAS: XQuery and Web 2.0

[Christian Grün]

>  I think the most important part is to put out there open source XQuery
> modules that do useful stuff, like an
>  online store, a CRM app, and/or some fun stuff like some IPhone apps that
> can be written nicely with XQuery.

Starting with the example of web applications.. I really miss standard
modules for web servers (like Apache) to directly support XQuery
scripts on server side. But, in contrast to other languages used in
the web (PHP, Python, ...) there isn't just one XQuery implementation
out there, so people have to decide (1) which implementation they use
and (2) they have to get it working with their server application -
they could also opt for the application dependent web support, but
most people probably don't want their xml application to act as web
server. So one way could be to develop well-defined interfaces for
existing servers to simplify the integration of one's favorite XQuery
implementation.

In my opinion, XQuery is a nice and relatively easy language to
construct web sites. Working with students, I got the impression that
many even prefer XQuery to XSLT as the first one allows pretty compact
code and seems pretty accessible as long as details such all those
date/time operations are left out... But if it comes down to real
projects, people seem to prefer languages like PHP as they are simply
much better supported - and if one tries to convert a typical dynamic
web page to XQuery, the (current) limitations become quite obvious (no
file access to store site statistics, troublesome handling of binary
content, ...). This might be partially overcome in future if standard
libraries are added - and this is probably the only way to convince
most users that XQuery is not just academic and in fact a
general-purpose programming language (correct me if I'm wrong..).

Regards,
Christian