ANSWERS to "What's wrong with XQuery" question

[James Fuller]

thanks for the summary Daniela, I am picking up this thread late.

I dont have any conclusions, but wanted to add a few random thoughts.

* all xml based technologies got seriously effected by the latest war
over what HTML should be ... in some ways this war is worst then the
classic browser wars in the 90's as it is developer communities pitted
against each other rather then commercial entities staking out lockin.
Maybe commercial entities have gotten more savvy but the end result is
that significant portions of the developer community are opposed to
XML, mostly due to issues of perception rather then technical analysis
... I could mention DOM but thats another permathread.

* For many web developers, working with XSLT was always via some
'host' language which gave them the impression that XSLT was not
standalone. XSLT is a wonderful language and since 2000 I have done
all sorts of obscene things that you shouldn't do with it ...but lets
face it, its a magnitude easier to teach a developer XQuery and there
will always be those who comment on XSLT verbosity. There have been
some saying why not put all of XSLT goodness (template matching) into
XQuery ... I know the technical args for and against, but it would be
interesting but perhaps too bold a move to consider.

* the hegemony that is javascript in the browser is one of the real
problems ... we need to have more 'real' standardized choices on the
web clientside (XQuery, Perl, anything) and whilst there will be those
who argue that javascript is a great language, one could argue that a
language that needs a framework (e.g. jquery) to be useful is maybe
one that has some fundamental design issues, but I have nothing
against a language that looks like a funny version of c (which is a
fav of mine) but just that ecmascript is the only relatively standard
option across all browsers. We all thought XSLT might be that 'other'
language but for one reason or another it has failed to take off
(another reason for the web crowd to hate us for); I doubt we will see
XSLT v2.0 in any browser soon.

* nosql databases have made inroads where xml databases have not, and
this is mostly down to aspects of comparable scale and performance ...
I see standards such as websockets being very important  and I don't
see why XML databases can't just expose AJAX push & JSON interfaces
over their datastores. Also, lets remember that nosql has some very
deep pockets when it comes to what companies are supporting the
development of these standards/implementations ... its great that a
lot of the technology is open source but we need to come up with new
tricks to compete.

* XML may seem complicated to 'todays' developers but thats because
they never spent hours with a hex editor debugging a binary
undocumented data format ... so pain is relative ... for many people
XML is about angle brackets, which is clearly just syntax ... we need
to make it very easy to go from XML->JSON and back ... if this means
we create a short hand version of XML that is easily consumed and
understood by the 'javascript generation', so be it but the longer we
look like the 'complicated data format' the longer we look like this
generation's 'binary'.

* xpath is the quiet superpower underneath XQuery/XSLT ... I always
wondered why things like
http://docs.jquery.com/DOM/Traversing/Selectors#XPath_Selectors are
not being used more or why XPATH itself has not found its way deep
into the web architecture/browser.

* XQuery is a funny language and I like it as (once we get HoF) its
essentially a functional programming language for those who work with
XML. It hits a certain sweet spot and in combination with an XML
database makes developing web data applications a breeze. Though as
others have mentioned, it is a bit of a mess, I do worry about the
emerging proliferation of libraries which could be standardized ...
but I don't think anything a W3C WG fixing these (some minor) issues
would have a big impact in adoption.

* If we look past the vagaries of tag soup, the web today can be
looked at as a very large distributed database of documents where
search engines have become the main query endpoint and REST the
mechanism for interacting ... there has to be a lot of opportunities
there where XML databases and XQuery have a bigger future then just a
niche publishing technology but we need to come up with some good
ideas sooner rather then later.

James Fuller