Oracle announces XQuilla / XQilla XQuery engine available under the open source Apache 2.0 license

In the year that XML celebrates his 10th anniversary, Oracle announces to make the XQuilla XQuery engine available under the open source Apache 2.0 license. Via official sources, the following was stated:

• Oracle is making the XQuilla XQuery engine available under the open source Apache 2.0 license – furthering the adoption of XQuery and XML for application areas including Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Content Management.
• The XQilla XQuery engine, an implementation of the XQuery 1.0 standard published by the W3C, enables developers to query XML data, similar to SQL for relational data.
• The XQilla project is hosted on SourceForge, where an active community collaborates to further the technology.

Oracle is one of the contributors, developers, of the XQilla source base. Although XQilla has its  source foundation in Pathan, XQilla has been developed and improved considerably from the Pathan code base. The XQuilla Engine 2.0 (and higher) will be available under the Apache license; XQuilla 1.1 is still under SleepyCat license.

What is XQilla? As stated here:

XQilla is an XQuery and XPath 2.0 implementation written in C++ and based on Xerces-C. It implements the DOM 3 XPath API, as well as having it’s own more powerful API. It conforms to the both the XQuery and Path 2.0 W3C recommendations. 

The next release of Oracle Berkeley DB XML will use XQuilla 2.0. Release dates are unknown to this date. The version 2.0 engine implements also document projection. This is a technique for reducing memory usage and increasing query speed:

The implemented document projection, an optimisation technique that prunes sub-trees of documents not needed for the query at parse time. This is enabled by default in the V2 engine.

What makes this announcement so important, in my honest opion, is that it also will (maybe) free the way for the W3C XQuery Update Facility 1.0 candidate specification / implementation, which is embedded in the XQuilla Xquery engine, for other Oracle products. Or at least one step further into that direction, making XML in general more complete. IMHO I think therefore, this is one of the reasons why this is exciting news. Some of the examples given via the sourceforge website can be found here: XQilla, XQueryUpdate.

A summery of the XQilla version 2.0.0 Release can be found here: XQilla version 2.0.0

See the official Oracle Press Release here:  Oracle Contributes XQilla XQuery Engine Under Open Source Apache License

Marco