This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Weiqi Gao. Original Post: Finding Your Lost Youth Through XQuery Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog Feed URL: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/rss.xml Feed Description: Sharing My Experience... Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Weiqi Gao Latest Posts From Weiqi Gao's Weblog

This is going to be a weirdly convoluted post. But you can skip all the details and go directly to the money link: http://markmail.org/. Here's a screenshot:

Now, my story.

A long time (1575 days) ago, I wrote an article about XQuery for the JNB. I joined the xquery-talk mailing list that was started by Jason Hunter and others a few months earlier to solicit (and received) feedback from the experts. I kept myself subscribed to the mailing list. And yesterday, I replied to a post by Daniela Florescu about XQuery and Web 2.0:

Daniela Florescu: I just came back from Web 2.0 Expo in SF. I listened through lots of interesting presentations of various technologies for building mashups.

Needless to say, *nobody* mentioned the name XQuery.

Why !?

with a message full of sarcasm:

Me: The Web 2.0 crowd loves gimmicks. And XQuery is the quintessential straight-faced academic + proprietary/big vendor specification.

Here's something to try:

1. The Web 2.0 crowd loves a catchy acronym. They have LAMP, where the P originally referred to PHP, but can be substituted by Python, Perl, etc. Why not rename XQuery PXQuery and claim a piece of the LAMP pie?

2. The Web 2.0 crowd loves open source. Everything they talk about is open source. Why not make all XQuery implementations open source, at least free as in free beer?

3. The Web 2.0 crowd loves a language that's deep and weird. Nobody likes prototype based objects, yet JavaScript wins the day. What does XQuery has that mystifies people? FLOWR expressions just doesn't cut it. Add something novel to XQuery, like Map-Reduce, or mandate tail call optimization. Better yet, add REST support. Ruby on Rails can add REST support, so can XQuery.

4. The Web 2.0 crowd loves everything Google/Amazon/Yahoo! does. Paul Graham wrote an online store with Lisp and made millions, and has been milking that fact ever since. Have him, or someone like him, write a CMS or something in XQuery, and then *sell it to Google* to make millions of dollors. And then say things like "Google used XQuery to write their CMS."

5. This one should be obvious: There is no way that the Web 2.0 crowd will love XQuery *1.0*. 1.0 is so 1990's. Call the next update XQuery 2.0!

Now, try these slogans out:

BOSTON, APRIL 1, 2009---The W3C released XQuery 2.0 today. This refresh of the venerable XQuery 1.0, three years in the making, brings major new functionality into the specification, chief among them the full support for REST, highly parallel and concurrent programming with Map-Reduce, and the spec mandated full tail-call optimization that will guarantee scalability and performance. Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and fifteen XQuery engine vendors today also announced the Open Sourcing of their products. Tim O'Reilly, the father of the phrase "Web 2.0" welcomed the W3C's move today: "With this release, XQuery is fully Web 2.0 buzzword compliant."

This lead to a post from John D. Mitchell:

John D. Mitchell: [...]
> I think what your saying is that XQuery needs a killer app - and I agree with that.
I'm way biased but check out http://markmail.org/. Pure XQuery backend with the latest Ajax hotness for a UI.

That lead me to the MarkMail site mentioned above. MarkMail was covered by the O'Reilly Radar. It imports archives of mailing lists and offers a good UI for searching and browsing the contents of the mailing lists. What is rarely mentioned is the fact that its backend is pure XQuery.

In the screenshot, I searched for my posts to the ant mailing lists. The results are shown in a Flash chart on the top left corner. Here's a silent screencast (in Ogg Theora format, you might want to download the VLC Media Player) that shows how you can interact with it.

It's sooooo much better than all the other mailing list archives that I had no problem finding this thread from 2706 days ago, which showed how the ${ant.project.name} property was added to Ant in the span of 8 hours, starting with Mark Volkmann asking the question to the final commit of the patch.

That's how I spent my time back then. And thanks to MarkMail (and XQuery), I get to relive my youthful moments.

MarkMail is a killer-app of XQuery indeed!