The W3C XQuery working group has published a new working draft of XML Syntax for XQuery 1.0 (XQueryX), the first update of this spec in more than two years. This defines a very ugly, pure XML-based syntax for XQuery that doesn't even use normal XPath syntax. Frankly, this syntax is so incredibly horrid that one suspects the working group deliberately sabotaged the effort in order to silence all the critics who've been complaining that XQuery is only pseudo-XML. However, XSLT is a proof by example that XML syntaxes for Turing-complete languages for processing XML don't need to be illegible. XQuery could be written in XML. The working group has simply chosen not to enable that in any real way. Neither XQueryX nor the pseudo-XML of real XQuery is an acceptable solution. The W3C should either abandon XML syntax for this effort completely for something along the lines of the RELAX NG compact syntax or define a genuine, usable XML syntax like XSLT's. The current XQuery syntaxes are just condescending, convoluted, and confusing.
Brendan Macmillan has posted version 2.1.4doc2 (whatever that means) of Java Serialization for XML (JSX)
2, a library for converting Java objects into streams of XML
and reading the objects back from the streams. To use it, replace
ObjectOutputStream with
JSX.ObjectWriter and ObjectInputStream
with JSX.ObjectReader. This is a bug fix release.