[MarkLogic Dev General] RE: Editor experience (Black, Charlie (Mission Systems))

[David Sewell]

On Thu, 11 Jan 2007, James A. Robinson wrote:

> That's not to say I dislike Oxygen, I use it all the time and love it.
> The tech support is pretty responsive as well, and actual execution of
> ML code from within the editor works just fine.
>
> Personally, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that a) the XQuery spec
> hits final recommendation status within the next month or two and b) ML
> releases an update to allow for evaluating the updated syntax changes!
> At my workplace we're *just* starting to get into using MLS, and it'd
> be so nice to have everyone writing code which is compatible across the
> various XQuery aware tools. :)

Updating existing ML Server XQuery code to XQuery 1.0 syntax won't be a 
trivial operation, but I agree that the less divergence from current 
standard the better. Although it will probably always be the case that 
any XQuery code that does complex jobs will need to use proprietary 
extensions, and there won't always be a one-to-one mapping between one 
implementation's and anothers.

I find that for our workflow, working with long docu-centric XML files, 
it works best to use Saxon queries with files on a local filesystem 
while lots of changes are being made to them, then switch over to ML 
Server code once the files are fairly stable (because the time it takes 
to reload and reindex files on the server is often a bottleneck). It is 
sometimes a nuisance switching back and forth, but there's also an 
advantage to being "bidialectal" in two versions of XQuery. We find that 
oXygen is a good editing environment particularly in this case since 
it's easy to switch back and forth from MLS to Saxon as a processor. If 
validation support and debugging for MLS were available in oXygen it 
would be close to ideal.

DS

-- 
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager
Electronic Imprint, The University of Virginia Press
PO Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318 USA
Courier: 310 Old Ivy Way, Suite 302, Charlottesville VA 22903
Email: dsewell at virginia.edu   Tel: +1 434 924 9973
Web: http://www.ei.virginia.edu/