XQuery

DanMcCreary recently blogged about what he terms XRX on http://xml.com . I could not post my comments there, so I will keep them here until I can...

An elegant introduction to an elegant architecture, Dan. Thank you. The essential takeaway from what you describe is the exploitation of XML from one end to the other end - especially from the Developer's perspective, for, how XRX actually manifests in runtime could be left to implementation technologies. Thus the logical architecture of XRX could be realized by a few variations of concrete technology - which is great. The XForms could be realized by XForms server technology (such as the excellent Orbeon stack), the ReST could be realized by any middle tier and the XQuery could be realized by an XQuery engine (such as Data Direct) that may actually be driving any one or a combination of datastores (XML, SQL, file system or ...) . The symmetrical and consistent leverage of XML as a data model from creation to transport to rest and back eliminates a whole lot of wasteful work. Like you point out, XPath is one of the most powerful query systems I have encountered; you can pack so much in so little and reuse it across the board with little if any change from the drawing board to production. In such a system as you describe, a business rule expressed once can be reused anywhere - from one end-to-end , however long the travel, as long as the architecture is XRX, like you have described. Thanks for expressing it so well. A few of your readers will not get it - it is one of those things that once you experience it, you are left wondering why this did not happen before. Oh, well!

. Gotta check it out.

Of late, our team at DOR (yours truly, DanMcCreary, AlexBleasdale, JasonParker) has been working with XQuery a lot. We love it. We love eXist database. Here is an article that if you ignore the marketing hype, still is close to what we found : http://www.xquery.com/customers/volpe.html