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Balisage 2010: Winners!

Contest Winner

The MarkLogic developer community is proud to announce Erik Hennum as the author of the winning entry of our Balisage 2010 "Tower of Babel" Contest.  Erik's entry stood out for it's detailed understanding of the current state of the art as well as its real and actionable proposal for wiki interchange using XHTML dialect declarations.  We've published his entry here and encourage those of you interested in the issue to take the time to read through it. I guarantee you'll learn a few things.

DemoJam!

On Wednesday evening of the conference, we were also witness to another entertaining and mind-expanding DemoJam.  The entries in this Jam included:

This jam's winning demo was Wendell Piez's, "Generalized Overlap on an XML Platform", which received the most applause and allowed Wendell to claim an iPad.

Student Awards

And while we're naming winners, I'd also like to mention the Balisage 2010 Conference Student Award winners:

First Place:
  Stefanie Haupt, Bielefeld University

Second Place:
   Gioele Barabucci, University of Bologna

Third Place:
    Lena Wienecke Andersen, University of Copenhagen
    Kevin Caliendo, Loyola University Chicago,
    Andrew Dombrowski, University of Chicago
    Michael Greenlee, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Ken Herdy, Simon Fraser University,
    Deborah Maron,  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Mohamadou Nassourou, University of Würzburg
    Sven Windisch, University of Leipzig
    Vyacheslav Zholudev, Jacobs University Bremen

It was a great conference, all and all.  I felt like a winner myself, honestly, just being lucky enough to attend and contribute to this geeky gathering.  For those who coudn't make it, the conference and symposium proceedings are available online.  And a hearty thanks is due to Tommie Usdin, Debbie Lapeyre, and crew for making it all happen!

Fun With XQuery

Recently on a flight, I decided to put an idea to the test with programming in XQuery. I wanted to write a simple logic puzzle of some sort – what I ended up doing was writing a simple card dealing program. XQuery 1.0, along with MarkLogic extensions to the language (the “xquery version 1.0-ml” dialect), provides some great programming capabilities. The following example shows the usage of maps, recursion, logging (via xdmp:log()), random numbers (via xdmp:random()) and side effects (via xdmp:set()).
 
Why I don’t expect that a poker site, nor the latest strategy game, will be written in XQuery, it is refreshing to see any language used for something you normally wouldn’t use it for. Often, when doing so a developer can learn something new about a language when they look at it in a different context. Also, I hope the following example will show those new to XQuery a look at the language that they may not get to see in other tutorials or examples.

MarkLogic: Beyond NoSQL Part 3 - Geospatial, Registered, Reverse Queries and Match-making or How to Make Your Brain Hurt

In the final excerpt from his talk on the MarkLogic Universal Index, Chris Biow describes geospatial queries, registered queries as well as reverse queries and their use for alerts. He then goes on to really make you brain hurt as he describes composing forward and reverse queries together in a single query.

For those of you who haven't had a chance to check out Chris's excellent introduction to MarkLogic, you may wanna take a look at the initial post in this series or his introduction to the universal index before watching this video. 

To see the video in full, click here or you can use the embedded player below.