Many of the disadvantages of .XQL files can be mitigated with better support in your development environment. I'm working on OpenACS support in Emacs and have made several improvements that allow one:
- To quickly find a query in an XQL file.
- To browse the list of queries in an XQL file.
- Execute queries directly from an XQL file, including bind variable substitution.
- Add new query definitions to an XQL file with a couple of key strokes.
The above work is complete and has been tested by a hand full of OpenACS developers besides myself.
While the use of XQL files does require some getting used to and does have a set of drawbacks I never found the use of XQL files problematic. If anything, the lingering queries in the Tcl code caused the most confusion. My vote is to remove all queries from Tcl and place them exclusively in XQL files.
/Bart
