Mark Logic User Conference 2008: Generate Some XQuery Buzz

The Mark Logic User Conference, the world's largest gathering of XQuery users, experts and fans, is only two weeks away!

The jam packed agenda of sessions on ground breaking and diverse XQuery applications is a feast for XQuery fans.  You'll get to see real-world XQuery applications in action from content syndication at Simon & Schuster to the Electronic Flight Bag at United Airlines to the Army's Knowledge Management Systems.  There are also best practice sessions and sessions on the latest XQuery tools from Mark Logic.

So sign up here to and come on out to San Francisco to see how XQuery is generating some buzz across a wide range of industries and uses.

And really why would we expect anything less?  We've seen that XQuery (with some help from the easy to use MarkLogic Server) can quickly get you up and querying XML in minutes, scrape the web with ease, create new XML, enrich your content and power AJAX.   All from just plain old XML (which is the right model for content of course).

And as for generating buzz . . . well how about generating XQuery?  Like all good languages XQuery can be used in generative (or automatic) programming.  Thankfully with AJAX you don't need to generate Javascript so much any more (phew!) . . . but this approach still has plenty of uses.  For instance, I recently had to generate some XQuery for the very handy performancemeters to run on some sample content.  To generate the script, I used XQuery (of course):

<h:script xmlns:h="http://marklogic.com/xdmp/harness"> {
for $count in (1 to 100)  (: get 100 calls :)
let $selected := xdmp:random(3001) (: get a random number to choose from the 3000 documents :)
let $uri := let $uri := fn:base-uri(doc()[$selected]) (: get the uri of the selected document :)
return
   <h:test>
     <h:name>sample test</h:name>
     <h:comment-expected-result>transform {$uri}</h:comment-expected-result>
     <h:set-up/>
     <h:query>
     (: generate the XQuery to run for the test :)
      import module namespace tx="http://www.marklogic.com/test/transformtest" at  
         "transform-test.xqy"
    
         tx:transform("{$uri}")
     </h:query>
     <h:tear-down/>
   </h:test>
}</h:script>

In this simple XQuery I'm collecting some random URIs and and creating the calls to the transform function (which as a simple transformation ala XQuery Transformers) but you can see that this would be very handy to use the values in the XML to write custom XQuery for just a test . . . or even as part of your XQuery content application.

With all that XQuery can do its no wonder its good at generating buzz!

See you at the user conference,

Matt