Publication

Over the years, the HTML-based Web has become a platform for providing applications and dynamic pages that have little resemblance to the collection of static documents it had been in the beginning. This was made possible by the introduction of client-side programmable browsers. Because XML and HTML are cousins, XML technologies can be almost readily adapted for clientside programming. In the past, we suggested to do so with XQuery and implemented it as a plugin. However, using a plugin was seen as an insurmountable obstacle to a wider adoption of client-side XQuery. In this paper, we present a version of XQuery in the Browser without any plugin, needing only JavaScript to interpret XQuery code. This enables use even on mobile devices, where plugins are not available. Even though our current version is still considered to be at an alpha stage, we were able to deploy it successfully on most major desktop and mobile browsers. The size of the JS code is about 700KB. By activating compression on the web server (reducing the transfered data to less than 200 KB) as well caching on the client using the XQuery engine does not cause noticable overhead after the initial loading.

@inproceedings{abc,
	abstract = {Over the years, the HTML-based Web has become a platform for providing
applications and dynamic pages that have little resemblance to the collection
of static documents it had been in the beginning. This was made possible by
the introduction of client-side programmable browsers. Because XML and
HTML are cousins, XML technologies can be almost readily adapted for clientside
programming. In the past, we suggested to do so with XQuery and implemented
it as a plugin. However, using a plugin was seen as an insurmountable
obstacle to a wider adoption of client-side XQuery.
In this paper, we present a version of XQuery in the Browser without any
plugin, needing only JavaScript to interpret XQuery code. This enables use
even on mobile devices, where plugins are not available. Even though our
current version is still considered to be at an alpha stage, we were able to deploy
it successfully on most major desktop and mobile browsers. The size of the JS
code is about 700KB. By activating compression on the web server (reducing
the transfered data to less than 200 KB) as well caching on the client using
the XQuery engine does not cause noticable overhead after the initial loading.},
	author = {Thomas Etter and Peter M. Fischer and Daniela Florescu and Ghislain Fourny and Donald Kossmann},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the XML Prague 2011 Conference, Prague, CZ},
	title = {XQuery in the Browser reloaded Riding on the coat-tails of JavaScript},
	year = {2011}
}