Lambda the Ultimate

It rapidly became clear that a single language runtime is too limited for general applications ... as a minimum we needed both a linear-flow language and a recursive tree composition language ... while declarative languages are excellent for rapid assembly of XML operations, they are terrible for expressing business logic and logical flow-control ... Our other declarative language is XML Recursion Language (XRL). XRL is like XInclude with services, in which inclusion references fire service invocations into the URI address space in order to recursively compose an XML document. XRL is an elegant and powerful way of building XHTML applications ... The active URI, in combination with the local NetKernel environment, is a functional program - Introducing NetKernel.

Main site; Tour.

It's another XML pipeline (there's a Freshmeat project that lets Coccoon apps run in NetKernel), apparently from HP, which might interest people here.

XQuery Implementation in a Relational Database System. VLDB 2005.

This paper describes the experiences and the challenges in implementing XQuery in Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005. XQuery language constructs are compiled into an enhanced set of relational operators while preserving the semantics of XQuery. The query tree is optimized using relational optimization techniques, such as cost-based decisions, and rewrite rules based on XML schemas.

Quite detailed. Section 6 covers optimization, and coupled with section 7 discussing related work, might be enough for those not really interested in all the intricate details of SQL Server's implementation of XQuery.

I'm back... I had a great vacation (aside from being on my way to Toronto when this happened...) Now back to work ;-)

For interesting background on XQuery's development here's the full text of Udell's interview with Jonathan Robie.

Philip Wadler has a pair of Links demos up and running. One is a to-do list (source) that runs on the server but keeps state on the client via continuations; the other is an input validator (source) that is translated into Javascript to run on the client. A sample of the latter:

<input l:name="word1" type="text" value="{word}"/>
{[ if word == "" then <font/>
   else if isdigit(word) then <font color="blue">ok</font>
   else <font color="red">error: {[word]} is not a digit as a word!</font> ]}

(Previous Links discussion on LtU)

(via Michael Rys)

This is a Last Call Working Draft. Comments on this document are due no later than 15 July 2005...

I guess that those interested in this area know about this, and for others it is a bit too late to get involved, but at least it's good to know the status of the formal specification.

The Essence of Data Access in Cw, The power is in the dot! Gavin Bierman, Erik Meijer, and Wolfram Schulte.

In this paper we concentrate on the data dimension. Our aim is to describe the essence of these extentions; by which we mean we identify, exemplify and formalize their essential features. Our tool is a small core language FCw, which is a valid subset of the full Cw language... we are able to formalize the type system and operational semantics of the data access fragments of Cw.

If you have been following the discussions here of Cw, you already know about the language features discussed here, since the paper doesn't introduce new features. If you haven't seen Cw, section 2 is a short and readable introduction.

The rest of the paper is more formal, and unless you need to prove formal results regarding Cw, might not be all that interesting. It won't hurt to keep in mind that it exists, since some of us may need something like FCw at one point or another.

XML Enhancements for Java (XJ) are a set of extensions to Java 1.4 that integrate support for XML, XML Schema and XPath 1.0 into the language.

(one more to add to the list of XML/language integration attempts)

The 2nd draft of the SPARQL Query Language for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) was published a few days ago by the W3C's RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG). It's very SQL-like in syntax, but the fact that the data being queried is a graph brings in a raft of issues, as do things like RDF's support for (XML Schema) typed literals alongside named classes/instances. Early implementations include Rasqal (demo - Rasqal's C source, with lots of language bindings) and ARQ for Java. There's a public mailing list for comments.

Once the query language is hammered out then RDF triplestores should make a viable alternative to SQL/RDBMSs, especially for use on the Web and with other 'unstructured' data.

This article by Steve Maine argues that SOAP may be used as a canonical form for all varieties of messaging between participants in a distributed system, because they are all isomorphic to each other anyway:

For example, RPC and Messaging have already been shown to be isomorphic models of the same thing. There are similar dualities between "messages sent to a stateful service" and "methods called on a stateful object". All of these ideas are just attempts to build a conceptual model around the interactions between distributed systems. Unfortunately, each of these thought-models carries with it a certain amount of implicit semantic baggage, and that fact has really hampered the development of scalable, widely interoperable distributed systems to date.

I'm not sure if it's a rat I smell, or just my own inherent dislike of SOAP.

Dear Sir, I tried your distributed messaging protocol three years ago, and since then I have used no other...

Phil Windley is having fun with Scheme and XML (SSAX). His latest set of examples show how to use Amazon Web Services from DrScheme, and how to write DrScheme servlets.

Continuations must be next, right? :-)