Taught by Priscilla Walmsley.

Most XSLT developers stick to a familiar core set of XPath and XSLT instructions
and functions. There are a number of advanced features, many of them introduced
in version 2.0, that appear only rarely in stylesheets even though they can be
very useful in certain situations. In this course, we will explore some of these
less-used features, showing interactively how they can be applied to improve
existing XSLT stylesheets. XPath features covered will include operators like
intersect and except, << and >>, quantified expressions, and 2.0
functions that can significantly simplify your stylesheets. XSLT features
covered will include grouping, regular expression matching and advanced
modularization using modes and instructions like xsl:apply-imports and
xsl:next-match.

Taught by Adam Retter.

This class will provide an overview of the capabilities and use cases of XML
databases, examining some of the database products that support XML and how they
are being used. It will then cover the role of XQuery among other XML
technologies in the querying of XML databases.

As a group, the class will build a simple search application using XQuery and an
XML database (eXist). This will provide an opportunity for attendees to learn
the syntax and capabilities of XQuery, as well as see it in action. Major
features of the XQuery language such as FLWOR expressions, XML constructors, and
user-defined functions will be explained.

Taught by Michael Kay.

Run-time performance isn’t always your most important objective, but sometimes
getting performance right can be critical to the project. This session will be a
performance workshop: we’ll look at the methodology, techniques, and tools that
you can use to ensure your XSLT or XQuery code (and your XML application in
general) meets its performance requirements. This will be an interactive session
where we’ll explore different ideas by trying them out and measuring the effect.
If you’re planning to come, consider whether you have any material that we could
study during the workshop, and if so, let us know in advance: if the problems we
tackle come from real life, we will all learn more than if we use a textbook
exercise. Also think about whether there are any burning questions you want
answered (a couple of years ago, we studied the effect of schema-awareness on
transformation time, for example — this year it might be streaming or parallel
processing).

Taught by Florent Georges.

XSLT 3.0 and XQuery 3.0 come with a lot of new, powerful features.

XPath 3.0 itself comes with one of the most useful of them: function items and
higher-order functions; that is, the ability to manipulate functions and pass
them around, calling them dynamically and define new anonymous inline functions.
XQuery 3.0 has numerous additions on its own, among them grouping, windowing,
try/catch, and private functions. For XSLT 3.0, the biggest addition is the
support for streaming transformation. Florent will also introduce the packages,
the evaluation of dynamically computed XPath expressions, the extension of
template rules to atomic values, the try/catch mechanism and the new xsl:assert
instruction.