Hello Marco,
I don't really get why you want to exclude languages which you call "lower level of abstraction", at least to me the architectural reasons are not obvious at all. In the wild when I see XML handling applications which are not XQuery/XSLT I would say they are mostly Java, C# or python applications. All of them have XML handling capabilities, although I think they are rather weak and limited if you know XQuery. Bu anyway, certainly many people are using these languages for data handling in general, so I think they are a valid choice.
Apart from that I think there is not so much to compare XQuery with. Jsoniq comes to mind, because it is based on XQuery, but I think it is probably dead and never got any traction.
And depending on the scale of the data processing you handle you might want to consider a map/reduce approach, e.g. by using Hadoop and one of the several languages specifically designed for it.
Just my thoughts. Hope it helps
Dirk
On 02/22/2017 04:13 PM, Marco Lettere wrote:
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.