This year’s Mark Logic User Conference is May 12-14, in beautiful San Francisco. Attend the conference at no charge as a speaker! Submit a proposal for a breakout session on business applications, technical implementation, or best practices. Deadline is February 13th. Thanks! -m
Category: Mark Logic
If you’ve seen MarkMail before, you may be pleased to know that a new version launched last week, including new features (like saved search sets) for power users. If you haven’t seen MarkMail before, what are you waiting for? -m P.S. If you could use something like this behind your firewall, ping me.
After a delay, the code to my RDFa parser in XQuery is now available under an Apache license. Go get it. This is some of the earliest XQuery code I ever wrote, so go easy on me. It follows the earlier work on a functional definition of RDFa. And feel free to send in patches….
Overheard at XML 2008: “Wow, it’s a good thing Mark Logic sponosred, otherwise nobody would be here.” (there were only five tables in the expo area.) Overseen on the XML 2008 schedule: only one mention of XQuery, and that’s in relation to eXist, not the aforementioned sponsor. This conference does have a different feel to…
Lately I’ve been playing with some more advanced XQuery. One thing nearly every XQuery engine supports is some kind of eval() function. MarkLogic has several, but my favorite is xdmp:eval. It’s lightweight because it reuses the entire calling context, so for instance you can write let $v := 5 return xdmp:value(“$v”). Not too useful, but…
Kurt Cagle has a thorough review of MarkLogic 4.0, worth a read itself. But check out the comments: one poster says he interviewed with the company and didn’t get reimbursed. The MarkLogic CEO responds personally with an offer to make it right. Why can’t more companies be like this? -m
I’m working on a piece of software that, while not the answer to world peace, is still pretty neat and approaches a specific problem in a fresh way. The project is at the stage where it needs to get unveiled to early adopters in the target audience. So how does one introduce possibly unfamiliar concepts…
The company is in great need of talented XML professionals, including sales engineers, consultants, support, and technical writing. Let me know if you (or someone you know) is up for the challenge. -m
This post will be continuously updated to contain the most recent details about an XQuery 1.0 RDFa parser I wrote for Mark Logic. It follows the Functional RDFa pattern. At present there is little to say, but eventually code and more will be available. Stay tuned. -m
Through the weekend I put most of the final touches on an implementation of RDFa in XQuery. The implementation is based on the functional specification of RDFa, an offshoot of the excellent work coming out of the W3C task force. The spec contains a procedural description of the parsing algorithm, and several have successfully followed…
In C, if you find yourself writing large switch statements (or rafts of if statements), you should consider using pointers to functions instead. In C++, if you find yourself writing large switch statements (or rafts of if statements), you should consider using objects and polymorphism instead. In XQuery, If you find yourself writing large typeswitch…
This one’s internal. If you’re a Mark Logic employee, look me up. If not, well, expect things to be slow around here for a couple of days. -m
Looks like a reasonably-sized revision. The first public working draft seems downright thin, in fact, relative to all the SHOULDs and MAYs in the requirements document. In particular, I’d like to see progress on 2.3.16 Higher order functions. (Then do we get a book XQuery: The Good Parts? …kidding..) -m
During a Q&A session today, I asked a panel of MarkLogic users about whether they saw metadata (and specifically RDF) as becoming an important factor in the near future. Fair enough question, having just come from the SearchMonkey project at Yahoo! The answer: A qualified yes. Having a strong metadata store and query engine isn’t…
Other than training sessions today was the first day of the Mark Logic User Conference. And I was surprised by the feel of it: very much like a industry XML conference. Many familiar faces were there, like Norm, Zarella, Kurt, and Eliot. The sessions were somewhat more narrowly focused around MarkLogicy things, of course, but…
I’ll be up in San Francisco the rest of this week at the Mark Logic User Conference. If you’ll be there too, be sure to look me up. -m
A very short rant on the state of XQuery tutorial materials on the web (not naming any names or linking any links). I get it. Thank you for your fanatical emphasis on FLWOR constructs, but there is much more to it than that. A few introductory sources don’t fall in to this trap, though. Mike…
I just found out about a nice little XForms engine called Ubiquity. (Having dinner with Mark Birbeck, TV Raman, and Leigh Klotz certainly helps one find out about such things) :-) It’s a JavaScript implementation done right. Open source under the Apache 2.0 license. Seems like a nice fit with, oh maybe MarkLogic Server? -m
If you are used to XSLT 1.0 and XForms, you see { $book/bk:title } and think nothing of it. XSLT 1.0 calls the curly-brace construct an Attribute Value Template, which is pretty descriptive of where it’s used. Always in an attribute, always converted into a string, even if you are actually pointing to an element….
In my about page, I’ve written my CV in two lines. Why don’t you try it, then link back to here? I’ve been known to use this as an interview question, and it’s quite a bit harder than it looks. A clever candidate will turn the paper sideways giving themselves more room to write “two…
You probably noticed the byline on my recent Yahoo! developer network posting. It, and a few more posts still in the pipe, list me as a “SearchMonkey Team Alumnus”. So yeah, it’s official, I’ve hung up my exclamation point and moved on to something else. Specifically, Mark Logic, where a group of impressively talented people…