Jonathan Robie, a co-inventor of XQuery, believes the innovative XML query language is a critical tool to help software developers and systems integrators efficiently integrate data from a variety of sources to create the XML needed for Web development.  Robie is a technology leader at DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), and is a member of the XQuery Working Group.

In a featured presentation today at the Extreme Markup Languages 2006 Conference in Montreal, Robie discussed how XQuery and servlets together are an ideal tool for querying XML, relational databases and other formats, and how the combination is well designed for the kind of native XML processing and data integration so common in Web applications.

Robie’s presentation, “An XQuery Servlet for RESTful Data Services,” illustrates to the user-oriented XML software developer and architect audience other innovative ways to leverage XQuery, particularly for developers of data and commerce-oriented Web sites.

“A simple servlet can be used to deploy any XQuery as a data service, providing the XML data needed for businesses to build Dynamic HTML, Ajax, SOAP and XML publishing applications,” Robie said.  “As an XML-oriented data integration language, DataDirect XQueryTM is a particularly simple, productive and efficient way to do this task, dramatically better than writing procedural code for such tasks.”

Robie further elaborated on what ties together an HTTP request, the server-side resources needed to respond to the request and an XQuery that creates the response.

Dynamic HTML, Ajax, SOAP and many XML publishing applications and other XML programs act as Web clients, getting their data from Web servers using HTTP requests.  This data is often provided by servlets, many of which do nothing more than integrate data from multiple sources to create an XML or HTML result.  A servlet provides a REST interface to any XQuery that a developer places in a secure deployment directory on an application server.   XQueries written to access XML, relational and flat-file formats such as EDI create complex XML and HTML results, which can then be copied to the deployment directory.  This makes XQuery an obvious fit for data services on Web servers, application servers and SOAP servers.