[seek-dev] XQuery in Java

Dan Higgins higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
Wed Jun 11 11:32:44 PDT 2003


An interesting comment about XQuery from Elliotte Rusty Harold ( see 
http://www.ibiblio.org/xml, which is a good source for XML news).

"IBM and Oracle have submitted Java Specification Request (JSR) 225, 
XQuery API for Java (XQJ) <http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=225>, to the 
Java Community Process. "This specification will define a set of 
interfaces and classes that enable an application to submit XQuery 
queries to an XML data source and process the results of these queries. 
The design of the API will also take into account precedents established 
by other JSRs, notably JDBC and JAXP."

I have to say I think this is way too soon. XQuery is not finished yet, 
and there's virtually no experience with XQuery APIs in the community. 
Standardization should wait until there have been a number of different 
APIs, and we can begin to see what works and what doesn't. Otherwise 
there's a strong risk of repeating the disastrous experience of JAXP 
which is causing problems to this day (and JAXP was standardized much 
later in the life of XML than it is now with respect to XQuery). Design 
by standard is simply not a good idea. It locks in mistakes and locks 
out too many good ideas. IBM and Oracle and whoever else is interested 
should design their own APIs for XQuery, outside the JCP, and only later 
bring these together in a standards effort if a common API seems useful."

-- 
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Dan Higgins                                  higgins at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Ph: 805-892-2531
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) 
735 State Street - Room 205
Santa Barbara, CA 93195
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