Whence XQL?

[Stephen D. Williams]

Could you please recommend an Open Source project that I could use as a base and contribute
to?
Java preferably, something with indexing of multiple documents would be great.  Full-tag,
full-text would be very interesting.

I may be able to have one or more people work on this if it could have basic functionality
shortly.
I have some of my own ideas, of course....

sdw

Jonathan Robie wrote:

> At 02:19 PM 3/25/99 -0500, Gavin Thomas Nicol wrote:
>
> >I wouldn't bet my farm on that proposal. Folk at QL'98, both database
> >and IR, had serious issues with it.
>
> Frankly, I don't know of anything that has been proposed to the XML or web
> communities that hasn't found its critics. XQL has found both avid fans and
> strong critics. Since you make no specific technical claims here, it is
> hard to dismiss what you say with information, but perhaps I can make some
> broad statements that address what you are implying here.
>
> Both database and IR people made contact with me at QL'98, showing interest
> and appreciation, and we have been in active and enthusiastic
> correspondence ever since.
>
> XQL has been more widely implemented than any other XML query language (I
> just posted information on six implementations today), and it is closely
> related to XSL Patterns.
>
> The main criticism from database folks was that they wanted to see joins
> and transformations in XQL. Peter Fankhauser has proposed extensions to XQL
> for joins. Declarative transformations are, of course, very useful, but XSL
> can also be used for transformations. One of the big reasons for leaving
> joins and transformations out of the first version was to make
> implementation simple - which is why there are quite a few implementations
> of XQL. I suspect that there will be later versions of XQL that include at
> least joins; I'm less certain about declarative transformations, since XSL
> already exists and can do transformations, but I do really like declarative
> transformations.
>
> At least one IR person criticized XQL for doing too much, eg for having the
> parent/child relationship in addition to the ancestor/descendant
> relationship. This does, in fact, increase the complexity of
> implementation, but offers a distinction that I find important.
>
> The number of implementations of XQL shows that there's a fair amount of
> interest in it. People who have demonstrated it at trade shows send me
> email telling me how impressed people are - for instance, I have been
> getting email from Software AG, which is showing XQL at CeBIT this week and
> getting very enthusiastic responses. When I discuss XQL at trade shows, I
> get enthusiastic responses. So the fact that there are also critics doesn't
> bother me.
>
> If you want to implement a query language today, for reasonable effort, and
> you want to use a language that has been implemented in other software
> systems, I think XQL is a very good choice. There will be a W3C XML Query
> Language Activity, and it will develop its own query language, and nobody
> can say how similar or different it will be to any existing query language
> for XML. I'm sure there will be a lot of interesting and creative work done
> by the bright people who will be involved in that group - if you can afford
> to wait a year to implement a query language, then by all means wait for
> that language to be developed.
>
> Jonathan
>
> jonathan at texcel.no
> Texcel Research
> http://www.texcel.no
>
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