Rethink the Constraint-based search Query from Registry interface

[Ray Plante]

On Tue, 12 Apr 2005, Paul Harrison wrote:
> At the moment it is not so much that there is stuff that we want to do 
> that cannot be expressed in ADQL, but rather that ADQL allows more than 
> can be sensibly supported by the Registry Query model. e.g. subQuerySet 
> so the standard has written restrictions that are not expressed formally 
> in the interface WSDL. 

Important point!

> Well, in a way, you strengthen my argument with this statement! - ADQL/X 
> is too complex for humans to write directly, so you need a software tool 
> to convert from the human writeable version to the XML one. The problem 
> with having the XML version as a parameter in the web interface is that 
> every software *client* has to have the parser, so it puts a higher 
> barrier in the way of potential application programmers. Granted, now 
> there are some parsers available, so this should not be such a barrier 
> as it has been in the last year. 

Do you think the need to support a broad set of languages stronger on the 
server side or the client side?  Personally, I've assumed the server side.  
Having a Java parser gets you pretty far on the client side, I think.  The 
next priority might a C parser.  

cheers,
Ray