size of XQuery developer community

[Liam Quin]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:07:02AM -0700, Daniela Florescu wrote:
> The question from the audience always is: " How many XQuery developers  
> are there? "

My answer would be that there are some 50 implementations -- some
of the ones on the XQuery page are dead, but I keep hearing about
new ones, and the number seems to be growing, not shrinking.

SQL Server, IBM DB2 and Oracle all include XQuery support;
there are products like MarkLogic, Qizx, Saxon-SA, and others
at the XQuery level; then you work up to business logic, SOA
and customer relationship management, document management, and
so forth, products that use XQuery indirectly.

The number must be at least in the tens of thousands of people
writing XQuery code at least occasionally.  I thnk we need
to see standardised (or at least widespread) frameworks before
it will get much larger -
  - call XQuery from Java in one line (cf. what JQuery did for AJAX)
  - In a Web server, pass CGI/form parameters and query URIs to
    XQuery in a standrd way
  - some widespread modules, e.g. for wrapping system functions to return
    stff like the height and width of an image, or a list of files
    in a directory

I hope that exquery will help with this.

It would not surprise me if there were well over a million
people writing XSLT stylesheets on a frequent basis (or at least
working with them, say, once a month or more, at the source
level, as opposed to just running them).  Actually it wouldn't
surprise me if there were ten million, but I don't have any
evidence to suggest the number is that high.  It's hard to
measure, since Web browsers, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux, Microsoft
Windows and other operating enviroments all ship with XSLT
engines as standard.  But XSLT has been out there for a decade,
so it's got a bit of a head start.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin, W3C XML Activity Lead, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/ * http://www.fromoldbooks.org/