xquery & web server in browser

[John Snelson]

Florent Georges wrote:
> Robert Koberg wrote:
>> I was talking about the ability for the XML DB vendors finding it  
>> easier to have XQuery run natively in their DBs as opposed to XSL.
> 
>   Yes, but I wonder why XQuery would be more efficient than XSLT "natively on the server"?
> 
>   I would expect them to be as efficient as the other, excepted that XQuery module system could ease compilation, and on the other hand XSLT facility for grouping and pattern matching that should benefits runtime for those features (opposed to writing them by hand in XQuery.)

The problem is the dynamic dispatch in XSLT - you can't know at compile 
time which template will be invoked where. This is a problem because:

1) You generally can't get accurate static type information across 
template application.
2) You generally can't optimize across template application boundaries.

I think these aren't necessarily as much of an issue has they have 
traditionally been thought as. On the one hand we are seeing a number of 
schema-less XML databases, which rely less on static typing. On the 
other, I think that most XSLT stylesheets wouldn't benefit all that much 
from optimization across template application boundaries anyhow.

John

-- 
John Snelson, Oracle Corporation            http://snelson.org.uk/john
Berkeley DB XML:            http://oracle.com/database/berkeley-db/xml
XQilla:                                  http://xqilla.sourceforge.net