Discovering XQuery

Teaching XQuery

This morning I'm in San Francisco teaching a class on XQuery before the Mark Logic User Conference swings into session tomorrow.

As part of the class we'll be doing a lab using the Shakespeare XML and (the real reason for this post) the sample content is right here:

Download bill.zip

We're going to try, in about an hour, to download, install and configure MarkLogic Server and then load this content and do some queries with CQ.  Very much like the first part of the tutorial.

Yup - thats a live session with ~30 people all of whom will be executing XQuery after about an hour.  XQuery makes this possible - it really just works. 

Wish us luck!

Matt

Mark Logic User Conference Next Week plus MarkLogic Server 3.2 Released!

Just a quick reminder about the Mark Logic user conference next week in San Francisco.

As previously reported, there will be no naked people, but there will be lots of XQuery enthusiasts and talks on some of the most innovative information products from Congressional Quarterly, Harvard Business School Publishing, McGraw-Hill Education and more.

Tim O'Reilly will be giving a keynote on Wednesday and Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg will kick things off on Tuesday.

Its not too late to sign up and its still FREE!

To make things even better, on the eve of this great event Mark Logic has released MarkLogic Server 3.2!

As Mark Logic Products VP Ian Small says, this release is a real diamond that really puts the power of XQuery in your hands.

You can work with more types of content with extensive language support (down to the node level - cool!),  new conversions including Office 2007 (yup - now you can actually do somethng with Office XML) and more encodings (so you can now scrape non-utf-8 web pages). 

It also adds powerful search capabilities for efficient complex searches, makes the already blindingly fast performance even faster and adds content analysitics to power user navigation and information displays. Plus there are lots of goodies for XQuery developers including debugger support.

I'll be posting from the user conference so more on all of this to come.

Hope to see you in San Francisco!

Matt

P.S. maybe next year we'll hire Spencer Tunick

Go Native! CMS(s), XML and XQuery

This Thursday, May 10th 2007, I'll join Lisa Bos from Really Strategies to talk about the benefits of a native XML CMS and have a look at RSuite, an XML Content Management System powered by XQuery and MarkLogic Server.

This is a really interesting topic:  at the 2006 London Online show 51 of 60 software vendors selected the 'content management' category and of these 31 were offering a Content Management System.  In that crowded field, things like automatic accessibility, ease of use and eCommerce built-ins stood out.  But full support for XML and the powerful sub-document access and control it brings was almost totally absent.

For people who work with content, investing in XML is key to their business.  But as far as CMS systems are concerned, they often have to shoehorn, change or otherwise mangle their XML to work with them.  A couple of weeks ago, Lisa discussed this on the Really Strategies blog.  Dave Kellogg also has some thoughts on this.

So join Lisa and me on Thursday to hear more about XML and content mangement.

Sign up here and hope to see you there.

MT