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 AquaLogic Data Services Platform (ALDSP) is a middleware platform for building data services that integrate and provide operations over data drawn from spanning multiple heterogeneous information sources. A data service consists of an XML Schema instance, describing its information content, and a collection of XQuery functions and procedures that comprise its set of operations. This paper describes access control in ALDSP. We describe ALDSP's securable resource hierarchy, its fine-grained access control capabilities for securing portions of data service schemas, how XQuery can be used to specify data-driven security policies, and how user identity mapping is supported. We then provide an in-depth overview of how ALDSP works, including implementation techniques to keep access control checking from interacting badly with view rewriting, query optimization, and caching.

SQL has long been the standard language for retrieving and manipulating data in relational database systems. XML has become the standard format for data exchange, and XQuery is on its way to becoming the standard language for querying XML data. The BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides a service-oriented, XML-based view of heterogeneous enterprise data sources and allows this view to be queried using XQuery. AquaLogic DSP includes a JDBC driver that connects the old (SQL) world with the new (XML) world via a SQL-to-XQuery translator. This paper outlines the issues related to creating such a driver and details the approach used to translate SQL queries into XQuery expressions. The paper also touches on performance considerations related to handling XML query results in a context where JDBC result sets are the desired output format.