size of XQuery developer community

[Daniela Florescu]

>
>
> I honestly think that all the talk about XDM as a data model and XQ  
> as a turing complete declarative language, etc., is sort of moot  
> unless they do somehow enable something that RDBMS/BI/Data  
> warehouses/search vendors can't readily do with existing approaches.

Well, that's relatively simple to answer, I would say.

Here is are some examples of what you could do with XML/XQuery that  
you cannot do with the traditional three
tier stack (communication + application logic written in an imperative  
language + declarative query layer)

1. Have schema flexibility. Start writing code without a fixed idea of  
your schema, and/or change
your mind later. (one schema is evil enough, three layers of  
superimposed schemas, in three different models,
are exponentially evil for flexibility and customizability. Almost no  
evolution of schema is possible.)

2. Integrate text and documents into your information processing flow  
without adding software license, yet another layer,
more mappings, and different programming languages.

3. Optimize the performance of your information processing program  
globally, not locally, layer by layer,
by adding more and more intermediate caches and shortcuts, which in  
turn will turn your code maintenance a nightmare.

4. Be done in 2 weeks instead of 10 months. Time to market, by writing  
significantly less amount
of code, layer to layer connectors, plus data mappers from one model  
to another, etc, etc. Less
useless and redundant code to write and later deal  with.

5. Spend less time maintaining the code. If the XQuery optimizer is  
doing a good job, you don't need
to constantly rewrite your code to fix performance problems, as you do  
in java. Plus less number of lines of
code usually means less bugs. So smaller total cost of ownership of  
the code.

That would be my quick personal answer.

But that of course works if you know what you are doing with XQuery ....

Best
Dana








> If XQ is just an incremental improvement, it will always be a  
> marginal language (for example, that's how I see the XQ scripting in  
> the browser situation; it's simply not THAT much better than  
> JavaScript, and has the disadvantage of not having a million  
> libraries and code snippets and programmers).  I actually think that  
> it is much more than incremental in search, and it may be elsewhere  
> as well.
>
> -Rob
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 4:50 AM, Andrew Welch  
> <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk> wrote:
> 2009/8/31 Daniela Florescu <http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk>:
> >> why do developers and architects so stubbornly refuse just to  
> _listen_ ?
> >
> > Because we don't talk to them (a) enough and (b) with a message  
> that they
> > understand.
>
> What is the number one "killer app" for XQuery, shining example that
> can be given to people when talking about XML databases - one that is
> high profile enough that they may have heard of it?
>
>
>
>
> --
> Andrew Welch
> http://andrewjwelch.com
> Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/
> _______________________________________________
> http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
> http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk
>

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