size of XQuery developer community

[Hans-Juergen Rennau]

The question why XQuery has not yet become a widely used language has certainly many facets! But there is one which is easily overlooked: a widespread lack of a _deep_ understanding of XML. The vast majority of developers (and architects?) view XML essentially as a portable encoding. In other words: they look at XML at the lexical level, and they are not aware of the fact that the XDM constitutes a global, uniform information model, composed of a handful of concepts (sequence and item, six kinds of nodes, atomic types). They do not suspect that URIs and the XPath language create an information space in which any application is embedded and which it can ignore or use. They have not grasped the concept of an expression language whose values are information entities (that is, instances of that information model). So they are not aware of a new way of thought which strives to simplify things by designing information processing steps  - consuming input
 information, emitting output information. The very concept of such steps is not alive in their imagination; accordingly, they show no interest in information processing languages (XSLT,  XQuery, XProc). 

Perhaps the heart of the problem lies at the question how to integrate this new, information oriented view into object orientation. The latter, of course, remains _the_ paradigm, the former can only be a complement. It cannot replace object orientation, but it should and will modify how it is applied: it should influence the main abstractions governing a system design. Example: if you have to process external messages coming from different partners, having similar information content but different schemas, the obvious approach is to design an internal format, write software covering the functionality by processing/producing internal messages, and transform messages between external and internal format. To get the transformations done, all one has to do is write one class, which is configured by an XML file mapping format pairs to the names of stylesheets and or queries. I said "obvious", but experience tells me it is not obvious at all. 

I think the complexity of information to be consumed and produced is growing steadily. I wonder how absurd the waste of time and energy must get before the common awareness of XML deepens. Object orientation was invented (I think) in 1967. It became widely known more than 20 years later. This shows that it may be difficult to guess..  

With kind regards,
Hans-Juergen Rennau



----- Ursprüngliche Mail ----
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Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 11:17:05 -0700
From: Daniela Florescu <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk>
Subject: Re:  size of XQuery developer community
To: Adam Retter <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk>
Cc: http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk, Marcus Clemens <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk>
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I got several private answers to this question, all with the same  
comment:
in all cases people looked for XQuery developers and cannot find any.

Unfortunately XQuery will remain a niche language if this situation  
persists.

How did other languages/communities solve this kind of growing pain ?

Any suggestions ?

Thanks !!
Dana


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