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.