XML News from Monday, September 3, 2007

The W3C XQuery working group has posted the last call working drafts of XQuery Update Facility, XQuery Update Facility Use Cases, and XQuery Update Facility 1.0 Requirements. XQuery as it currently exists is basically just SELECT in SQL terms. XQuery Update adds INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE. More specifically it is:

• upd:mergeUpdates
• upd:revalidate
• upd:applyUpdates
• upd:removeType
• upd:setToUntyped
• upd:insertBefore
• upd:insertAfter
• upd:insertInto
• upd:insertIntoAsFirst
• upd:insertIntoAsLast
• upd:insertAttributes
• upd:delete
• upd:replaceNode
• upd:replaceValue
• upd:replaceElementContent
• upd:rename

Comments are due by October 31.

Version 1.1.0 of XQilla, an open source XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 library and command line utility written in C++, has been released. Xqilla is implemented on top of Xerces-C++ and derives from Pathan. Version 1.1 adds support for XQuery Update (Last Call Working Draft 28 August 2007). It is dual licensed under the Sleepycat licence and a BSD style licence.

The Saarland University Database Group has released GCX, an open source open-source XQuery implementation written in cross-platform C++ and released under the BSD license. GCX is "designed for memory-efficient XQuery evaluation against large XML documents. The prototype supports a powerful fragment of the XQuery language, with nested for-expressions, child- and descendant axes, and joins."