XSD, WSDL, XSLT

Schema-to-WSDL Madness. On the same XSLT theme, we've built this nifty utility that transforms an XSD file to a WSDL file with operations using the schema types as parameters (using, surprise, surprise, XSLT). [CapeBlog]

I like it. Something like this will come handy for me next week or two.

XQuery is redundant?

XQuery: Reinventing the Wheel?. There is a tremendous amount of overlap in the functionality provided by XQuery, the newly drafted XML query language published by the W3C, and that provided by XSLT. The recommendation of two separate languages, one for XML query and one for XML transformations, if they don't have some sort of common base, may cause confusion as to which language should be used for various applications. Despite certain limitations, XSLT as it currently stands may function well as an XML query language. In any case, the development of an XML query language should be informed by XSLT.
Collaxa's Take: Interesting XSLT/XQuery comparison. [Collaxa's Take]

Combine XSLT (soon to be released 2.0 spec looks promising especially its ability to handle multiple input docs at once) and http://www.xmldb.org/xupdate/ then you have XML syntax for query and update. Another blow against XQuery.

SQL and XPath. V.S. Babu wrote to ask what product was executing the XPath-enabled SQL query I showed yesterday. It's a beta of the new version 3.0 of OpenLink's Virtuoso. I've refined the query a bit, so that it also picks up RSS 1.0 feeds: ... [Jon's Radio]

If you can run SQL and XPath together, who needs XQuery? The first two are well established standards with mature implementations. XQuery is not. Moreover you have to learn a whole new language. No doubt XQuery by its design surely has some winners over others but (1) what are they exactly? (2) how often do you need them? and (3) can SQL+XPath provide workarounds for them at a reasonable cost?

An aside: Virtuoso seems to be one very viable answer to data federation problem.