xmlhack: Early XQuery implementation from Microsoft

Michael Rys announced the release of an XQuery prototype demonstrated by Microsoft at XMLDevCon in April.

For now, the functionality provided is limited to querying a set of sample documents and checking syntax:

"The site allows you to formulate XQueries and a subset of a proposed XQuery-compatible data manipulation language and parse and execute the former, but currently only parse the later. Since it is provided via a website, we provide a set of predefined XML documents and disallow the use of user-specified documents for security reasons. In addition the sites offers a a set of compliance tests that can be used to check the syntax for the XQuery parser. Since the tests are automatically generated based on the syntax, some of the statements may not have meaningful semantics."

Rys stated that the implementation " prototype currently follows the February 15, 2001 working draft and will be updated to the next working draft within weeks after the next working draft's publication."

Update: Jonathan Robie pointed out:

"these compliance tests were generated using the Microsoft grammar, not the grammar of the XQuery Working Draft, so they test compliance to the syntax of Microsoft's prototype, not to the XQuery language as described in the W3C specification. The examples in the XQuery Working Draft and in the solutions to the Use Cases exercise more features and are compliant with the XQuery language. I suggest that people use these for compliance testing."