I agree entirely that XQuery is unique and that calling it a query language gives the wrong impression. I gave a talk about this last August at Balisage:
http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol18/html/Murray01/BalisageVol18-Murray01.html Regards, Greg From: <basex-talk-boun...@mailman.uni-konstanz.de<mailto:basex-talk-boun...@mailman.uni-konstanz.de>> on behalf of Hans-Juergen Rennau <hren...@yahoo.de<mailto:hren...@yahoo.de>> Reply-To: Hans-Juergen Rennau <hren...@yahoo.de<mailto:hren...@yahoo.de>> Date: Friday, February 24, 2017 at 6:56 AM To: Maximilian Gärber <mgaer...@arcor.de<mailto:mgaer...@arcor.de>>, "basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de<mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de>" <basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de<mailto:basex-talk@mailman.uni-konstanz.de>> Subject: Re: [basex-talk] Somewhat unusual question To put it mildly, I disagree. I think the greatest mistake one can make is call XQuery a query language. I prefer to say that it is an information language. If this appears to be an incomprehensible statement, this reflects the novelty of the concept of an "information language". A book should be written about it. Which points to my ... second disagreement, which concerns your statement that there is nothing special about XQuery. I think XQuery is unique, as it is (or am I wrong?) the first and only general-purpose programming language which is a pure expression language built upon the ground of a value model centered in the concept of resources composed of globally addressable, interrelated information (i.e. nodes). With kind regards, Hans-Jürgen Maximilian Gärber <mgaer...@arcor.de<mailto:mgaer...@arcor.de>> schrieb am 21:36 Donnerstag, 23.Februar 2017: Hi Marco, from my experience, the best way to handle these types of arguments is to make clear that there is nothing 'special' about XQuery. It is a query language. If you have to compare BaseX to something that most Java developers will know, I'd use Hibernate and HQL, a library and DSL that is all about querying data(bases). For C# developers, LINQ would probably ring a bell. Of course there is a lot more to it, and when it comes to web applications, you can use it in almost every layer (templating, routing, storage, etc). Regards, Max 2017-02-22 13:43 GMT+01:00 Marco Lettere <m.lett...@gmail.com<mailto:m.lett...@gmail.com>>: > Hi to everyone, > > probably this is not the right place for such a discussion but the BaseX > communitiy is the one I'm better introduced to and the one I trust the most. > So I hope that this somewhat unusual excursus will anyway be of interest to > some of you. > > As for myself I fell in love with XQuery and its power in terms of data > manipulation many years ago. I wouldn't change it with anything else and BTW > we're using it (thanks to the incredible BaseX runtime) much beyond > data-processing being it the backbone of all our micro-service oriented > architectures. > > Now, to the point, in the near future I probably will be called to face a > somewhat skeptical customer who will argue about the technological choice of > XQuery. > > My point will be to make a comparison with the technologies they're > currently using and I would like to demonstrate that for a rather XML- (and > in general data-) intensive workflow XQuery is perfectly suitable and > probably better than many other alternatives. > > I would tend to exclude XSLT because it would face similar opposition. I > would also exclude languages at a lower level of abstraction like Java, > Python, Javascript, C/C++ and so on for obvious architectural reasons. > > But then only templating languages/engines come to my mind. Those would > still be probably novel technologies to learn and wouldn't offer the > structural, syntactic and semantic power of XQuery anyway. > > So I ask you kindly, in order to complete my preparation on these matters, > is there anyone that has experience with other tools or languages that can > be compared with XQuery when used for XML querying, generation, > transformation, templating, composition and so on? > > Thanks a lot! > > Marco. >
