So I got a ping from William Candillon yesterday on IM, but I wasn’t around so am just now getting in sync with him today. He and I had a discussion about a year or so back regarding a potential internship with Dana Florescu, you know, the primary mastermind behind the XQuery language. Well, fast forward to a year or so later and it turns out that through a collaborative cross-organizational effort, the following folks,
Cezar Andrei
Vinayak Borkar
Matthias Brantner
Nicolae Brinza
William Candillon
Dana Florescu
David Graf
Donald Kossmann
Tim Kraska
Dan Muresan
Sorin Nasoi
Daniel Turcanu
Markos Zaharioudakis
… got together and created,
We are pleased to announce the first release (beta version 0.9) of Zorba. Zorba is a general purpose XQuery processor implementing in C the W3C family of specifications. It is not an XML database. The query processor has been designed to be embeddable in a variety of environments such as other programming languages extended with XML processing capabilities, browsers, database servers, XML message dispatchers, or smartphones. Its architecture employes a modular design, which allows customizing the Zorba query processor to the environment’s needs. In particular the architecture of the query processor allows a pluggable XML store (e.g. main memory, DOM stores, persistent disk-based large stores, S3 stores). Zorba runs on most platforms and is available under the Apache license v2.
In this first release of Zorba, the following functionalities are implemented:
XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 (as in the W3C recommendation) except modules and only limited support for schema validation.
XQuery Update Facility 1.0 (as in the evolving W3C recommendation).
An in-memory replaceable XML store implementing the XQuery Data Model (XDM) W3C recommendation.
Zorba release 0.9 passes 97.6% of the W3C tests of XQuery 1.0 test suiteand 99.4% of the XQuery Update Facility test suite. However, this release is not optimized for performance (e.g indexes are not supported yet).
Oh, my… This looks pretty sweet! As per the subject line, something tells me this project is something you should be paying attention to. And as per above, the first release is available *NOW*.
*SWEET*! I’ll be playing with some code this morning and after chatting some more with William, will update this thread with some extended thoughts. Until then… :)
M. David,
I have been trying to find someone to use the domains xQuery.Org or xQuery.Net . Kurt was interested, but I guess he is to busy now
If ANYONE knows someone that would like to use these domains for FREE - please contact me! Any help would be appreciated!
Ric
OpenDomain.Org
Can someone provide some comparison with Saxon? Is the big difference C++ vs Java/.NET?
@Ric,
Not sure who, but no doubt somebody will want to take you up on the offer, and this is certainly the place to find interested parties. ;-)
@Joshua,
At this stage of the game, given that Zorba was literally just released yesterday, I'm not sure if any comparisons will exist. That said, there are two primary reasons why I think this project should be something to keep an eye on,
1) As you point out, it's written in C++, so there's a good chance it's going to be pretty fast.
2) It's being developed by a *ROCKSTAR* group of coders including the core creator of the XQuery language itself.
Given the above two facts, I wouldn't be surprised if Zorba quickly becomes the baseline benchmark that everyone else uses to compare their own products against. Every product is going to have it's advantages, so they'll all find ways to highlight what they feel makes them better suited for a particular task. But this project has all of the makings of becoming the standard XQuery engine, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's exactly what takes place.
Time will tell... :)