The Zorba development team is pleased to announce the release of Zorba 2.6, codename Eros. The release is available in ourdownload section.

Eros contains several new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes that are available on our ChangeLog. But there is one feature on that list that we are particularly excited about…

For a couple of months, we have been working on a project named JSONiq, which extends the XQuery data model with JSON objects and arrays. The JSONiq specification has now reached a mature state and Zorba 2.6 is shipped with a JSONiq implementation. In other words, Zorba now supports JSON natively.

{
  "Greeting" : (let $d := "JSON"
                return "Hello, " || $d),
  "Farewell" : string-join(("Live", "long", "and", "prosper"), " ")
}

The specification as well as railroad diagrams that showcase the grammar are available on http://www.jsoniq.org.

If you already know XQuery, you can learn JSONiq quickly with the tutorial JSON for XQuery. If you come from the JSON world, you will find an adapted tutorial named XQuery for JSON.

Finally, you can play with JSONiq on the Zorba sandbox

Please find us at the Zorba booth next week at @ NoSQL Now! to learn more about JSONiq. Four talks featuring Zorba and JSONiq will be given:

• Advances in XML and XQuery by Daniela Florescu
• JSONiq: XQuery for JSON, JSON for XQuery by Jonathan Robie
• Implementing JSONiq: Add JSON to your XQuery processor in no time by Chris Hillery
• Harnessing Flexible Data in the Cloud by Matthias Brantner

We are looking forward to meeting you at NoSQL Now!