I was at a conference today where I attended an excellent presentation by Dr. Daniela Florescu, a developer of the XQuery language and editor of the W3C specification. Besides being one of the best-dressed software engineers I've ever seen, she's brilliant. As someone who works with XML applications every single day, I found her talk really interesting. She talked about a kind of a paradigm shift away from the standard "parse XML, bind it to an object, do some magic" philosophy of most XML-aware applications to using just a declarative transformation language like XQuery (plus perhaps some scripting extensions) to do the same magic. It doesn't look like we're quite ready for that world yet, but I'm excited about it.
Of course, I say this literally as I'm architecting a sort of data transformation framework in Java that takes XML as input, binds it to an object, then spits out XML as output, with a bunch of complicated transformations in between. Sounds crazy in this new world, hmmm? Doing the whole thing in XQuery would be simply impossible, but thankfully my object-XML binding technology of choice (XMLBeans) has built in support for XQuery. So for transformations where is makes sense, I can use XQuery! This will offer me the best of both worlds, I think.
