it’s not jquery v. xpath

I’ve been talking to a few developers about what i’m doing here (building xpath4js) and each time I get the same response, “Why not just use jquery”. Well, as far as I can tell jquery is an all purpose javascript library that does a heap of cool things including some xpath support. jquery would be useful for use in a production site today and, in that scenario, I would use it too.

Xpath (and particularly xpath 2.0) is all about working with xml and sets of data (sequences of nodes and/or atomic values). With: xml namespace support; function extensibility; and xpath 2.0 being a subset of xquery, it becomes clear that jquery and xpath are two very different things.

Jquery and xpath are not mutually exclusive and it’d be pretty amazing if in the future jquery was to support xpath 2.0 :p

xpath4js is a GWT implementation of the XPath 2.0 recommendation of the w3c. The project is in its early stages and has a *long* way to go, but will be released as a javascript library under the GNU license scheme.

happy coding :)
Pete