Wednesday 19 April 2006 Talk: XPath2, XSLT2, and XQuery

Slides and speaker notes from a 90 minute session presented at ACCU Conference 2006

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You can search an XML document with XSLT2 and you can style an XML document with XQuery. No wait ... no, that's right. And the other way round too. In that case, do we need both? Can we bin one of them? Is it just an accident of corporate politicing that they both exist?

In this session I'd like to sprint through XSLT2 and the new features it adds to the existing XSLT spec. That will necessarily lead to an examination of XPath2, the expression language it incorporates. Since XPath2 also forms the basis of XQuery, I obviously can't ignore that, and intend to spend a reasonable chunk of time comparing XSLT2 and XQuery, looking at their similarities, differences and intended usage.

Since query and transformation languages are rarely used in isolation (when was the last time you wrote a naked SQL query?), I also want to look at using XPath2 and XSLT2 from a host language (probably Java, since it currently has the best tool support).

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Tagged talk, xslt, accu-conference, and code

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