Juri Leino & John Lumley : XPath XSLT and XQuery 4, Whats in it for me? (part 3)

As active members of the QT4 community group we would like to show and explain new important key concepts as well as smaller quality of life changes coming with XPath, XSLT and XQuery 4.0.

The session will be include hands-on tutorials in order to further familiarise with the above.

We will likely prepare small examples that can run in “fiddles” to illustrate the most important parts. This will also allow us to gather some feedback.

To give you some idea what this might entail (given we have enough time).

For XSLT

Simple syntactic sugar additions
xsl:if/(@then|@else), (xsl:when|xsl:otherwise)/@select, xsl:choose etc.
Enclosed modes
Declared item types
Map and array construction
Record types and xsl:record
Templates with map and array type matching

For XPath / XQuery

Additions to conditional syntax (otherwise, if without else)
String templates (not string constructors)
Additions to let and for
Option arguments
Context value
The pipeline and the “arrowbang” operator
Generalised nodes and lookup operators (JNodes)
Additions to the type system: record and enum
Explain map key order
Destructuring statements
New higher-order functions (do-until, partial-apply)
JSON and CSV support
New map and array functions
fn:apply-templates

Juri Leino is a software gardener from Berlin with over 15 years of experience in web development. In most recent years he has joined the exist-db project as a core developer focussing on the XQuery runtime. Next to consulting for exist-solutions and jinntec he also maintains and develops node-exist and gulp-exist and created XQuery libraries like xbow, exist-jwt and dicey.

A Cambridge engineer by background, John Lumley spent the majority of his career as one of the founding members of HPLabs Bristol. Latterly he specialised in XSLT-based document engineering, in which he subsequently gained a PhD in early retirement. Rarely happier than when writing XSLT to write XSLT, he spent the next several years helping Saxonica, including developing the XSLT-based XSLT compiler now used in SaxonJS. Now in proper retirement he still likes to 'potter' with XSLT and is currently an active member of both the QT4 and the Invisible XML Community Groups.