XQuisitor

XQuisitor is a simple GUI interface for XQuery based on Michael Kay's Saxon 8. XQuisitor is free software, written in Java, published under the GPL. It is an end-user application that has no public API (at least not yet). Java 1.4 is required.

XQuisitor is not complete unto itself. It depends on Saxon to do all the hard work of querying. Saxon-B 8.4 is bundled. Saxon is Copyright 2003 Michael Kay, and is published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0.

Running XQuisitor

The xquisitor.jar file is a runnable Jar archive. After you've decompressed the archive, you can run it from the command line like so:

% java -Xbootclasspath/p:lib/saxon8.jar -jar xquisitor-1.0a5.jar

If this doesn't work for you, you can launch it like this:

% java -classpath lib/saxon8.jar:xquisitor-1.0a5.jar com.macfaq.xquery.XQuisitor

Of course you should adjust the classpath to point to whereever you installed the two necessary jar files.

The Ant build file can also create an XQuisitor.jar file which includes the necessary Saxon classes. This can be run without adjusting the bootclasspath. However, for licensing reasons a prebuilt version of this file is not included. You'll have to build it yourself.

Currently, XQuisitor has only been extensively tested on Linux and Mac OS X. I'm working on improving the integration with various platforms.

The interface should be self-explanatory. Just type your XQuery into the query box, and press the Run Query button. Queries and output can be saved, loaded, cut, copied, pasted, printed, etc. in the usual way. You can set a base URI and/or a context document to be used if the query uses relative URIs and/or relative XPaths.

If you would like to know more about XQuery, you might start with the notes from my XQuery presentation to the XML Developers Network of the Capital District on January 21, 2004.

The current version is 1.0 alpha 5. Comments, bug fixes, user interface quibbles, etc. are all appreciated. Send feedback to elharo@metalab.unc.edu

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