Re: [Qexo-general] Open source Xquery implementation

[Per Bothner]

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Alex Siegel wrote:

> *       A compact binary representation of XML data (currently called
> "TDXML" or "traversable dense XML"). For typical documents, this format
> requires only 10% to 20% of the memory as the original XML. In addition,
> an application can very efficiently process TDXML (e.g. search for
> elements with a particular name). TDXML can also be stored and sent in
> messages directly, without need for reparsing.

> *       A complete, compliant DOM implementation (level 2). This is the
> preferred interface for manipulating XML data programmatically. This DOM
> implementation is designed to make transformation much faster by
> eliminating the vast majority of node clones.

These sound interesting.  Does the DOM implementation make use
of TDXML?  Qexo uses a compact "array" representation of XML
data, and a node is basically an index into the array.  This
saves having to create an objet for each node.  Do you handle
type annotations - i.e. the post-validation info set?  (Qexo
doesn't yet, but the data structure is flexible enough that
I hope to add it soon.)

One step you might consider is if these components are stand-alone
you could release these compoents as open-source libraries.
For that to make sense they have to be significantly better
than existing libraries, at least for certain application areas.

Your other features sound interesting too, but these were the
ones that seemed most "seperable".

> It's a very fast engine, and over a man-year of effort has gone into it.

That's an impressive man-year's worth of effort, even if you built
on existing code.

> Maybe the best approach is to attach myself to
> an existing team and port technology over.

Certainly I would welcome help improving Qexo.  Currently it's
just me, and I have no funding for XQuery, so I have have to
concentrate on Kawa Scheme (for which I have some funding).
(Some Kawa improvements help both Scheme and XQuery, of course,
including an almost-finished reimplementation of environments.
Once this is done I hope to work a bit more on XQuery, now
that the latest specification has cleared up module import.)
--
        --Per Bothner
address@hidden   http://per.bothner.com/