The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published eight documents in the XML family as Candidate Recommendations, sending a signal to the developer community that powerful new features for transforming and querying XML are ready for implementation.
XSLT 2.0 is a major revision to the very successful XSL Transformations language, which transforms XML content into other formats. XSLT 2.0 standardizes many features and includes stronger support for internationalization and richer tools for the programmer. In addition to new functionality, XSLT 2.0 introduces strong typing and supports the optional use of W3C XML schema. Strong typing is a feature of enterprise-strength programming languages such as Java, C++ and C#, and is designed to reduce errors in programs, slashing the cost of developing and maintaining large systems.
XML Query brings the power of database search and select to XML. With XML Query, one can run cross-vendor cross-database joins between multiple forms of data, including XML documents, XML-native stores, relational database tables and more.
Connections between large applications, databases, operating systems, Web services and Web servers have traditionally used special software that, on demand, converts and manipulates data between the formats used by applications. With a standard way to integrate tools, a standard set of data formats and standard ways to query and manipulate those formats, users will be able to focus on their higher-level business logic and integrate new sources of data much more quickly.
• For a list of all recommendations see www.w3.org/TR/.
Author:
Compiled by Hannelore Hämmerle and Nicole Crémel