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

[Jason Hunter]

Daniela Florescu wrote:
> It's not exactly true. Me, together with many other people who 
> participated to
> the creation of XQuery (only *some* of us, though !), since day one, we 
> always had in mind,
> while designing XQuery, a  general programming language for XML data 
> processing,
> and not merely a "query" language (whatever that means).

For what it's worth, we're having great success using XQuery as defined 
today as a general purpose web programming language.  For performing 
updates, making fast text search calls, and all the rest we just use 
functions.  Here's a list:

http://xqzone.marklogic.com/pubs/3.2/apidocs/All.html

FWIW, it seems messy and unnecessary to me to change the language in any 
significant way to support these things.  I prefer the Java approach. 
Simple language, complex libraries.  Empirically you can, for example, 
do fast text search through library calls.  So let's do that.

-jh-