[10 August 2011]

Recently I had occasion to build a small web application (feedback forms for the Balisage conference) using XForms. I used XForms since XForms delivers the information from the user in an XML document, which makes it easier for me to work with the data later. As an experiment, I developed the app using Sausalito, the XQuery engine in the cloud developed by 28msec. Quick summary: Cool! Thumbs UP!

[Obligatory hand-waving and disclaimer: Sausalito is not the only way to deploy XQuery in the cloud: MarkLogic has defined Amazon machine instances with MarkLogic Server pre-installed, and I’m sure there are, or will be, other options as well. I will continue to make a point of working with as many different XQuery implementations as I can, just to know what’s out there. But I had a lot of fun with Sausalito, and if you have a use for a Web-based XML application, Sausalito is definitely worth a look.]

The basic structure of a Sausalito project is fairly straightforward, and well documented on their site: the URIs you want to serve are matched either against static resources in a public subdirectory of the project, or against a directory of XQuery modules containing handlers for requests. For example, in the Balisage feedback application, the URI /reviews/single is handled by the single() function in the module reviews.xq; it can call library functions defined elsewhere. Sausalito has all the functions usual in XQuery, and also some fairly extensive libraries of things you may want for web applications (to query aspects of the incoming HTTP request, for example, and to set properties in the response). They have an Eclipse-based IDE that’s reasonably nice (though I still missed Emacs from time to time), and also a command-line interface (so I can shift to that and use Emacs, if I want to).

Unsurprisingly, I found it very pleasant to be able to write the core of the application in XQuery, with no Javascript, returning XML to the browser and using XSLT and CSS to render it there. What did surprise me a little, because I had not expected it, was the exhilarating speed with which I was able to move from idea to deployed application. I’ve deployed XForms applications on the Web before, and I have an eight-point checklist for setting up a WebDAV server using Subversion and Apache. It’s not particularly difficult or strenuous, but it’s tedious and takes few hours each time I have to do it. And developing the checklist was very painful; it took a long time to find configurations that worked for me, in the environment provided by my service providers.

The developer configures a collection of documents in Sausalito by declaring the collection:

declare ordered collection my:docs as node()*;

Then they deploy the application. And it’s … just … there. Instant gratification, or as close to instant as your network latency and bandwidth will allow.

As I wrote to the developers at 28msec:

I’m … very taken with the convenience of deploying to the cloud; having an XML database on demand is a lot like having running water on demand — those who have never had it may think it’s a luxury anyone should be able to live without, but once you’ve had it, it can be hard to go back.