" Jason Hunter is co-founder of the JDOM project, proprietor of servlets.com and xquery.com, and author of the classic book Java Servlet Programming. Nowadays Jason works with Mark Logic, whose Content Interaction Server (CIS) marries fulltext search with XQuery-based XML search and transformation. In today's screencast, Jason shows some of the things he can do with a corpus of O'Reilly book content."

Watch Jason Hunters screencast

There is more news on the XQuery front. Jonathan Bruce (JDBC 4 spec lead) has been brought over to DataDirect from Sun:

DataDirect Technologies, the leading provider of components for connecting software to data, today announced the appointment of Jonathan Bruce to XQuery technology evangelist. A technical and specification architect with experience leading industry standards such as JavaTM, J2EE and SQL, Jonathan will be responsible for advancing the XQuery and XQJ standards and driving the adoption of DataDirect’s new XQuery products.

Jonathan joins DataDirect from Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he served as the JDBC specification lead and architect for the Java Platform. While at Sun Microsystems, Jonathan led four Java Specification Request efforts and successfully patented technology that now forms an integral part of the latest J2SE and J2EE platforms. Jonathan’s background also includes business development, sales support as well as inbound and outbound licensing consulting for the Java platform and database-dependent components of Sun’s Java Enterprise System.

Both are speaking at the TheServerSide Symposium 2005

The screencast is really cool. You hear Jason talking to someone (perhaps Dion?) and walking through an example application that uses MarkLogic and XQuery. The application is browser (Safari) based and is hot by itself.

My question: How did you record the demo? It's really, really cool.

-Frank

The screencast is really cool. You hear Jason talking to someone (perhaps Dion?) and walking through an example application that uses MarkLogic and XQuery. The application is browser (Safari) based and is hot by itself.My question: How did you record the demo? It's really, really cool.-Frank

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/02/17.html#a1179

Nowadays Jason works with Mark Logic

Never heard of him. Any reason why his work colleague has any significance ? :-)

MarkLogic is a company/product, not a person.

JSR 225: XQuery API for Java (XQJ)

http://www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=225

Are vendors planning to adopt XQJ?

-Sean

DataDirect Technologies will currently accepting applications to our Beta Program for our XQJ implementaion of the Early Draft Review of the JSR-225 Specification.

http://www.datadirect.com/products/xquery/index.ssp

You can also use it in our XML Developer suite, Stylus Studio.

http://www.stylusstudio.com/

That is pretty cool. A few simple FLWOR expressions instead of lengthy XSLT's.

But what if I want to update the XML?

Wolfgang Meier's eXist supports XQuery and XUpdate. Check out these cool demos -

http://demo.exist-db.org/exist/examples.xml

Michael Kay has said this "For XQuery, as far as I'm concerned the key benefit is that it does database access, which XSLT was never designed for. However, there's a lot of overlap between the functionality of XSLT and XQuery, and there seem to be many people who want to use XQuery just because they prefer the syntax."

http://www.stylusstudio.com/michael_kay.html

I haven't yet seen XQuery work well with both. For ex. I can't do this efficently - Search a bunch of XML files for certain data stored in the database. Update that XML adding that data as tags. Store that XML. Provide a full featured search engine to search that "enriched" XML.

- vineet

I haven't yet seen XQuery work well with both. For ex. I can't do this efficently - Search a bunch of XML files for certain data stored in the database. Update that XML adding that data as tags. Store that XML. Provide a full featured search engine to search that "enriched" XML.- vineet

This is a really common XQuery use case --> Querying XML and re-shaping the data, and you can do it visually with Stylus Studio's XQuery mapper.

Update and full text search functionality will not make it into XQuery 1.0, however there are several working drafts which outline this functionality and it will be developed over time. A recent interview with Daniela Florescu, the editor of the XQuery Specification discusses the status of those items.