The AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) is a middleware platform developed at BEA Systems for building services, referred to as data services, that integrate, access, and manipulate information coming from multiple heterogeneous sources of data (including databases, files, and other services). ALDSP uses functions that produce and consume XML to model heterogeneous information sources, so the integration logic for data access services in ALDSP is specified declaratively using the XQuery language. A challenge that we faced in developing ALDSP was providing effective graphical tooling to help data service developers to develop information integration queries. In this paper, we describe the graphical XQuery Editor (XQE) that resulted from our attempt to tackle this challenge. XQE handles the full XQuery language and provides a robust two-way editing experience involving both graphical and source views of each query. XQE is novel in being the first commercial graphical XQuery editor to support both of these features.

The BEA aqualogic data services platform (ALDSP) is a middleware platform for creating services that integrate and manipulate information from disparate enterprise data sources. This paper provides a technical overview of the all-new update support in ALDSP 3.0, released in January 2008. It describes the update side of data services, our unique model for making update automation transparent and flexible, and the use of the XQuery Scripting Extension (XQSE) for further customizing the system's default handling of updates. It also gives an overview of the ALDSP update processing machinery, including the automatic generation of update maps from read functions, translation of update maps into update virtual machine (UVM) programs, the UVM instruction interpreter, and SQL generation for updates to data drawn from relational data sources.