Whence XQL?

[Ed Howland]

Sorry for the cross post.

I read most of those position papers as well. But the one by Jonathan Robie,
Texcel, Inc. Joe Lapp, webMethods, Inc. and David Schach, Microsoft
Corporation seemed the most complete. It even has a BNF for a parser for
XQL.

It occurred to me that someone might have taken that BNF and made it into
something by now. One assumes that MS or the one other co-author's companies
might be doing that in the their skunk works, about to release something.

The papers described different syntatical forms. The XSLish one of XQL(MS)
seemed useful especially in light of embedding it in CGI-like urls.

I am just experimenting, but in the hope that this might become another 
xml-dev mini-project. 

So far I have the BNF translated to a ANTLR grammer. I had to fix one
infinite recursive definition in the original file (filter). I also had to
decide which things were tokens and which were true productions. It is still
broken at this point because it generates many non-determinisms. Most of
these are due to the tendancy to represent things like Text and NCName as
starting out with Letter and continuing through to Letters again via some
path. I'm going to have to research how to do this better. I'd like to
preserve the nomenclature of the article so everybody is operating with the
same documentation, which is at http://www.w3.org/TandS/QL/QL98/pp/xql.html
BTW.

The parser it generates works on a few items but not entirely. If anybody
shows any interest and has experience with ANTLR, I'll post it and we can
collaborate.

Ed


-----Original Message-----
From: Avi Rappoport [mailto:avirr at LanMinds.Com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 24, 1999 9:53 PM
To: Ed Howland; 'xml-dev at ic.ac.uk'; 'xsl-list at mulberrytech.com'
Subject: Re: Whence XQL?


At 7:24 PM -0800 3/24/1999, Ed Howland wrote:
>Ok, so now it is April (or thereabouts) and still no XQL. I've read all the
>hypeware about this and I understand that its just a suggestion for a
>proposal for a note for a draft for a recommendation. Whatever.
>I want my XQL!

There's a great article by Lisa Rein on the W3C Query Workshop late 
last year -- I'm sure it's still at XML.com.  There are links from 
the article to the position papers of the participants, and I found 
them fascinating and enlightening.  There are a *lot* of issues to be 
solved!

Avi

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