We are pleased to announce the first release (beta version 0.9) of Zorba. Zorba is a general purpose XQuery processor implementing in C++ the W3C family of specifications. It is not an XML database. The query processor has been designed to be embeddable in a variety of environments such as other programming languages extended with XML processing capabilities, browsers, database servers, XML message dispatchers, or smartphones. Its architecture employes a modular design, which allows customizing the Zorba query processor to the environment’s needs. In particular the architecture of the query processor allows a pluggable XML store (e.g. main memory, DOM stores, persistent disk-based large stores, S3 stores). Zorba runs on most platforms and is available under the Apache license v2.
In this first release of Zorba, the following functionalities are implemented:
- XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 (as in the W3C recommendation) except modules and only limited support for schema validation.
- XQuery Update Facility 1.0 (as in the evolving W3C recommendation).
- An in-memory replaceable XML store implementing the XQuery Data Model (XDM) W3C recommendation.
Zorba release 0.9 passes 97.6% of the W3C tests of XQuery 1.0 test suiteand 99.4% of the XQuery Update Facility test suite. However, this release is not optimized for performance (e.g indexes are not supported yet and certain traditional rewriting strategies are still missing).
