Adam Retter

adam@evolvedbinary.com
 

XML Prague
@ University of Economics, Prague
2026-06-04

@adamretter

• Director of Evolved Binary

  • UK - Software, Consultancy, Training, and R&D

• Co-founder and Co-owner of eXist Solutions

  • Germany - TEI Publisher software

• Software Engineer / Prolific Open Source contributor

  • Elemental (NoSQL/XMLDB) - Founder

  • eXist-db - 20 Years as Core contributor (last 9 as main dev.)

  • RocksDB - 8 Years as RocksJava main developer

• W3C XQuery Working Group - Invited Expert

• Founder of EXQuery, and creator of RESTXQ

• Enjoys Research and Development, and Snowboarding

• Share Knowledge and Experiences

• Have Fun!

• Talks:

  1. Learning XQuery One Dish at a Time - Jennifer Ramirez-Betancur (ZBMED)

  2. Some Experiences Gained in XQuery - Liam Quin (Delightful Computing)

  3. Can it Run Doom? - Younes Bahloul (Evolved Binary)

  4. RumbleDB: JSONiq on Apache Iceberg - Dr. Omar Hammoud (ETH Zurich)

  5. The Link eXtractor, a Largish XQuery Application - Dr. Nico Verwer (Rakensi)

  6. Elemental in XProc / AI in Open Source? - Adam Retter (Evolved Binary)

  7. cityEHR in Ukraine - Prof. John Chelsom (Seven Informatics)

• Then... Open... Unconference Style Discussions and Questions

Adam Retter

adam@evolvedbinary.com
 

XQuery + XMLDB Meetup / XML Prague
@ University of Economics, Prague
2026-06-04

@adamretter

• XProc 3.1 Step - p:xquery

• Source Port

  • Input Sequence

  • Context Item

  • Default Collection

• Query Port

  • The XQuery

• Parameters Option

  • Includes XQuery Variable Bindings

• Call Elemental for p:xquery

• Support Elemental embedded in JVM with Calabash

• Support Elemental Server over HTTP from Calabash

• Deserialization of all XDM Types from HTTP (Variables)

• Set Context Item from HTTP / Embedded

• Set Default Collection from HTTP / Embedded

• New XQuery Execution API (Embedded)

• Serialization of all XDM Types to HTTP (Query results)

Elemental 7.6.0 / 6.10.0 - PR #199

Upcoming: Elemental 7.6.1 / 6.10.1 - PR #224

• Connector for Elemental Embedded in JVM

  • Start/Stop Elementa as needed

  • Multiple Database Instances

  • Conversion to/from Saxon XDM to/from Elemental XDM

• Connector for Elemental Server over HTTP

  • Multiple Remote Servers - HTTP URIs

  • Conversion to/from Saxon XDM to/from Elemental HTTP XDM

Calabash - PR #673

Adam Retter

adam@evolvedbinary.com
 

XQuery + XMLDB Meetup / XML Prague
@ University of Economics, Prague
2026-06-04

@adamretter

• SOCIAL

• ECONOMIC

• ENVIRONMENTAL

• POLITICAL

• LEGAL

• TECHNICAL

• How much human creativity involved?

  • May not be copyrightable by you

  • May not be copyrightable by anyone

  • 2026 - US Supreme Court - Thaler appeal

  • 2026 - Allen vs. Perlmutter

• What was the AI model trained on?

  • Has the AI reproduced copyrighted code (patterns)

  • Your code may be contaminated / violating licenses

  • 2025 - Class Action - Bartz vs. Anthropic PBC - $1.5B

  • 2026 - US Ninth Circuit - Doe vs. GitHub

  • Lawyers assume that AI code reproducing training data is a violation

Sena Evren: Who Owns the Code Claude Wrote?

• Applies to all of our Software Projects

• We do not Accept or Create Code from AI *

• We Cautiously use AI for:

  • Conversations about different algorithms/architectures

  • Refactoring our code

    • An LLM is basically a big text matching engine!

    • Sometimes better than Regular Expressions / Perl

    • Glorified find and Replace!

    • e.g. Find uses of interface XYZ where close() is not called

* Excluding our fun Doom demo: XDoom