News

eXcelon exclaims XSLT tool, XIS updates

• By Jack Vaughan
• October 2, 2002

XML specialist eXcelon Corp. this week announced release 4.5 of its Stylus Studio XSLT IDE that lets developers work in a WYSIWYG environment to convert HTML pages to XSLT style sheets. It includes an XQuery editor and debugger that helps development team members learn XQuery with step-by-step debugging and a display of variable values. Also due from eXcelon is a new version of its XIS native XML database server.

The XIS 3.1.2 server supports development of systems that use the emerging XQuery standard to access, query and audit XML documents. The update is also said to deliver better speed, as well as .NET support that allows systems to share XML documents between .NET and J2EE architectures.

XQuery could have a profound effect on the course of XML. It addresses some issues that stand as obstacles to greater XML deployment. While XQuery techniques are also available to RDB deployers, XQuery for some relational configurations requires systems to pull entire documents out of memory before launching a query, said an eXcelon representative. And this creates issues.

''We see some new Web services-related documents containing 30-Mbyte messages. They are huge. People don't want to have to pull down entire documents [of this size] in order to do a query,'' said Larry Alston, eXcelon's executive vice president. eXcelon has further helped the querying masses in this release with support for full Verity text search of XML documents, he noted.

A major benefit of XQuery is that it brings greater standardization to XML data handling. But as it is also set to be available to SQL RDBMS makers who have added XML handling abilities (often via ''shredding'' and ''BLOBing'' methods) to their systems, and given that even deeper XML/RDB links may be on the way, Alston was asked where native XML stores would still gain favor.

''People that need highly granular and extensible data handling will find a good fit,'' said Alston. Systems that center on many types of common corporate documents could meet these requirements, he said, noting mortgage applications, insurance claims, product catalogs and patient care systems as examples.

For more on XML data issues, go to ''DataDirect bows XML transformer'' by Peter Bochner at http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6756, ''Q&A with Kevin Dick: Where is XML headed?'' by Jack Vaughan at http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6445 and ''What's in store for XML storage?'' by Jack Vaughan at http://www.adtmag.com/article.asp?id=6418.