XML & Prague. Does it get any better than this for angle brackets aficionados?
Every year, XML Prague is one of the most exciting events of the year for the Zorba development team.
And for the 2012 edition, the organisation committee pulled out all the stops.

Contributors to the Zorba project were attending the conference. From the left to the right: Rodolfo Ochoa (Oracle), Dennis Knochenwefel (28msec), David Graf (28msec), and Juan Zacarias (Oracle).

It all began on Thursday, February 10th, with the The pre-conference day. Various sessions were held with three XML databases on the menu: eXist-db, BaseX, and 28msec.

Note that 28msec leverages Zorba to run queries and web applications entirely written in XQuery. In a nutshell, 28msec is putting Zorba to the Cloud and is backing it with a scalable store.

The pre-conference day was just an appetizer for the main conference track on Saturday and Sunday. The videos of all the talks are available on the XML Prague TV archive. XQuery was well represented with a couple of very interesting talks.

First, Jonathan Robie and Michael Kay introduced us to the novelties in XQuery & XSLT 3.0.

Then Adam Retter presented an elegant set of XQuery 3.0 annotations to build RESTful XQuery applications.

Finally, John Snelson showcased transform.xq a pure XQuery 3.0 library that brings the template-matching paradigm from XSLT to XQuery developments.

The most disruptive talk during the conference was undoubtedly the introduction of JSONiq by Jonathan Robie. JSONiq extends the XQuery Data Model with JSON entities. The project has two goals:

• To provide the expertise and maturity of XQuery to JSON-oriented systems such as NoSQL databases.
• To provide first-class support for JSON to XQuery applications.

Zorba implements JSONiq in a development branch. You can try it live here.

An enormous Thank You to the XMLPrague organization comittee and to all speakers for such an inspiring weekend.
Looking forward to the next edition.