Biography
Jonathan Robie is the XML Program Manager at DataDirect Technologies. He is also a co-inventor of XQuery, the W3C XML Query language, and is now an editor of many of the specifications which define the XQuery language. He is also a co-inventor of XQL, an earlier XML query language which was a predecessor of XPath. Jonathan has been significantly involved in several other W3C Working Groups, acting as an editor for documents produced by the XML Schema and Document Object Model Working Groups, and has also participated in the W3C XML Information Set and XML Stylesheet Language (XSL) Working Groups. He is well known in the XML world, both as an innovator and as a speaker.Prior to joining DataDirect, Jonathan worked as an XML Research Specialist at Software AG, where he helped design architectures for XML servers and represented Software AG on the XML Query and XML Schema Working Groups. He has been on the architecture team for three XML databases or repositories, at Software AG, Texcel Research, and POET Software. He has a total of 13 years experience with advanced database systems and complex database applications, especially object oriented databases, multimedia databases, workgroup database applications, and XML/SGML databases.
XQuery is a native XML programming language that vastly simplifies programming with XML and is well suited to XML views of non-XML sources such as relational databases.
In many environments, data is exchanged as XML, but stored and queried using relational databases. XQuery can be used to process both kinds of data - but most implementations of XQuery either do not support relational data, support only one vendor's database, or require a particular application server. This makes it impossible to write portable programs that work in a wide variety of environments.
DataDirect XQuery(TM) is a database and platform independent XQuery product that allows developers to access both relational and XML data sources with a single query. It runs in any Java environment, and implements XQJ - the equivalent of JDBC for XQuery. Installing DataDirect XQuery(TM) is similar to installing a JDBC driver. A program written with DataDirect XQueryTM runs on any operating system, using any database, with or without application servers or other servers. It improves developer productivity by allowing programmers to write applications that work for any XML source and any major relational database (including older versions).
Robie will present DataDirect XQuery(TM), show how XQuery can be used to query an incoming web message and produce a response based on the data in the web message and the data found in a relational database. He will also compare this solution to others.
DataDirect XQuery(TM) is in alpha and will be in beta early 2005. There will be a GA release in 2005.
Since this was a product presentation, no paper was prepared for the proceedings.
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