Technical Issue for Face-to-Face

["Yaron Y. Goland" <ygoland@bea.com>]

An issue I would like to see put on the official issues list for the
face-to-face is support for XPATH 2.0 and XQUERY.

The current specification mandates support for XPATH 1.0 but XPATH 2.0 is
scheduled to reach recommendation status before BPEL is scheduled to be
released. Given the major advances made in XPATH 2.0 I move that we remove
XPATH 1.0 from the specification and replace it with XPATH 2.0.

In addition the current syntax used in BPEL would hinder the use of XQUERY
(which is built on XPATH). XQUERY would make both an excellent BPEL query
and expression language. But XQUERY makes use of XML elements in its syntax
and BPEL queries and expressions are exclusively expressed as attributes.
Therefore, in practical terms, it is impossible to use XQUERY with BPEL. As
such I move that we change the expression and query syntax in BPEL to use
elements rather than attributes so as to make it possible to support XQUERY
in BPEL. I also move that we introduce a formal identifier to be used with
queryLanguage and expressionLanguage attributes to identify when XQUERY is
in use but that we clearly explain that XQUERY support is optional.

	Thanks,

		Yaron