Re: [Exist-development] New list member offering services :)

[Dan M. <dan...@gm...>]

Hello Tony,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you.  We really welcome any help
documenting the eXist system, especially for beginners.

> Also, I thought that XSLT was by design better suited to transform what is
essentially the same document from one format to another, while XQuery is
preferable for grabbing subsets of data—for example, a bug database.

I think the second statement is true.  XQuery is perfect for quickly getting
the titles from a large collection of indexed XML documents.   But the first
is somewhat debatable.  My experience is that I can teach people how to do
an XQuery typeswitch tranforms in about an hour or two.  Most people prefer
the syntax of XQuery over XSLT.  In my opinion the only reason to write in
XSLT is if you must do the transforms in a browser.  There are no other
valid reason any more to continue to use XSLT.  I say this after spending
three years doing mostly XSLT and attempting to train others.  My work
teaching XQuery is that it is much easier to learn.  Especially by people
that have SQL or PHP experience.

In our case with the eXist documentation project we may have 1000 DocBook
documents in the future and we frequently want to get list of the documents
and perform searches in the database of keywords.  So they will all be
indexed in the system anyway.

We are now working on converting all the XSLT programs to XQuery for our
tools.

I would be happy to send you the source if you are interested, but it will
need to be cleaned up and documented.

Here are the first examples:

http://www.syntactica.com/rest/db/org/syntactica/apps/docbook/views/list-items.xq

I still need to get the source code to format like the eXist documents.

- Dan

On Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:37 AM, Tony Rogers <to...@go...> wrote:

> On Apr 8, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Dan McCreary wrote:
>
> Hello Tony!
>
> Welcome to the team!
>
> I am working on an XQuery script that will convert DocBook 5 to XHTML.
>
> Here is the start of two new beginner's guides:
>
>
> http://www.syntactica.com/rest/db/org/syntactica/apps/docbook/views/list-items.xq
>
> Let me know if you are interested in helping.  The conversion is being done
> with a typeswitch transform<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XQuery/Typeswitch_Tranformations>
> .
>
> - Dan
>
>
>
> Oh, I’m interested in helping anything that deals with outputting XHTML &
> CSS.  :)
>
> I admit I have VERY little experience with XQuery.  I’ve basically just
> played around with it now and again in oXygen.  I am much more experienced
> with XSLT 2.
>
> Also, I thought that XSL was by design better suited to transform what is
> essentially the same document from one format to another, while XQuery is
> preferable for grabbing subsets of data—for example, a bug database.
>
> I’m totally interested in helping, even if you have your heart set on
> XQuery!  I just wanted to ask about the choice to use it over XSL for a
> conversion.  :)
>
> (BTW let me know what I can do.  I may be inexperienced with XQuery but I
> know there is a much shorter distance from reading it to understanding what
> it does compared with XSL.  I think I’ll still be able to contribute
> something or other that might be useful.)
>
> —Tony
>



-- 
Dan McCreary
Semantic Solutions Architect
syntactica.com
952-460-1674
VOIP: 111@69.199.167.229