JSR #225 Expert Group Membership |
Blumenfeld & Maso principal Brian Maso has been appointed to the JSR 225 Expert Group. JSR 225, part of the Java Comunity Process (JCP), is the official group creating a standard API for XQuery. Eventually, the APIs and standards developed by this Expert Group will be added to a future version of J2SE or J2EE under the name "XQuery for Java" or XQJ for short.
One vision for XQuery is as an enterprise data "inter-lingua". Using XQuery its is possible to query across many different data sources: relational databases, XML documents, local flat files, LDAP trees, and other enterprise resources. Any repository that can represent its contents as XML is potentially a queryable resource for XQuery.
XQJ is an important standard for Java in the enterprise. It will provide a standard, implementation-independant API for connecting to and querying from different XML data sources. Many different XQuery engines may be used interchangably by the same XQJ-based application.
A Short Description of XQuery
XQuery is to XML what SQL is to relational data. XQJ is to Java and XML data what JDBC is to Java and relational data.
SQL is the standard language for selecting and extracting data from sources arranged using the relational data model. The relational model uses Tables made up of Columns are Rows to organize data. JDBC is Java's standard API for connecting to relational data sources, evaluating queries, and consuming the results as ResultSet objects.
Similarly, XQuery is the standard language for selecting and extracting data from sources arranged using the XML data model. The XML data model uses documents, document collections, elements and other XML concepts to arrange data hierarchically. XQJ is Java's standard API for connecting to XML data sources, evaluating queries and consuming results.
For further information:
- XQuery 1.0, developed by the W3C: the XQuery 1.0 Specification
- The Saxon XSLT and XQuery 1.0 engine
- The Gnu Qexo XQuery compiler and evaluation engine
- XQuery.com on-line resource of XQuery information