Conclusion

This evaluation shows that it is very interesting to use XQuery for writing programs for Data Workers. The corresponding programs are short ones because all the mechanics to effectively access or post data are necessarily embedded at lower level: an XQuery implementation with such features allows programmers to concentrate to data transformation and XQuery is clearly powerful at this.

Fleur is not yet a mature implementation and, effectively, not yet fully compliant with XQuery specifications but it is now already used in production because of all those extensions for Data Workers. Performance are not always very good but there are already known optimizations to be added.

For Data Workers, there are more extensions now identified as interesting to be added: generate PDF files (possibly using XSL-FO notation), send and receive emails, run Tesseract OCR to get ALTO XML documents. The use of handlers has also to be improved.