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 <mgaerber@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.lettere@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.
>