DataDirect Technologies Expert Presents at Extreme Markup Languages 2006 Conference.

BEDFORD, Mass. & MONTREAL -- Co-Inventor of XQuery Standard Reveals the Technology's Benefits in Simplifying Development of Web Services 

Jonathan Robie, a co-inventor of XQuery, believes the innovative XML query language is a critical tool to help software developers and systems integrators efficiently integrate data from a variety of sources to create the XML needed for Web development. Robie is a technology leader at DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS), and is a member of the XQuery Working Group.

In a featured presentation today at the Extreme Markup Languages 2006 Conference in Montreal, Robie discussed how XQuery and servlets together are an ideal tool for querying XML, relational databases and other formats, and how the combination is well designed for the kind of native XML processing and data integration so common in Web applications.

Robie's presentation, "An XQuery Servlet for RESTful Data Services," illustrates to the user-oriented XML software developer and architect audience other innovative ways to leverage XQuery, particularly for developers of data and commerce-oriented Web sites.

"A simple servlet can be used to deploy any XQuery as a data service, providing the XML data needed for businesses to build Dynamic HTML, Ajax, SOAP and XML publishing applications," Robie said. "As an XML-oriented data integration language, DataDirect XQuery(TM) is a particularly simple, productive and efficient way to do this task, dramatically better than writing procedural code for such tasks."

Robie further elaborated on what ties together an HTTP request, the server-side resources needed to respond to the request and an XQuery that creates the response.

Dynamic HTML, Ajax, SOAP and many XML publishing applications and other XML programs act as Web clients, getting their data from Web servers using HTTP requests. This data is often provided by servlets, many of which do nothing more than integrate data from multiple sources to create an XML or HTML result. A servlet provides a REST interface to any XQuery that a developer places in a secure deployment directory on an application server. XQueries written to access XML, relational and flat-file formats such as EDI create complex XML and HTML results, which can then be copied to the deployment directory. This makes XQuery an obvious fit for data services on Web servers, application servers and SOAP servers.

DataDirect XQuery is the fastest, most reliable and scalable XQuery support for all major relational databases. In synch with the most up-to-date XQuery specifications, DataDirect XQuery has been implemented and is delivering faster, better-performing XML applications in real-world installations. Database independent, DataDirect XQuery greatly simplifies application development and integration, allowing portability across databases and leading to simpler, easier to maintain applications. More information is available at http://www.datadirect.com/products/xquery/index.ssp.

About DataDirect Technologies

DataDirect Technologies is the software industry's only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world's most critical business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards. Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect(R) products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC(TM) and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (Nasdaq: PRGS). For more information, visit www.datadirect.com or by phone at [phone].

DataDirect and DataDirect XQuery are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.