Planned specification to be announced on Tuesday Oracle and IBM on Tuesday plan to announce a Java Specification Request (JSR) to define a Java API for invocations of queries written in the W3C standard XML query language, XQuery, according to an Oracle representative. XQuery, according to Oracle, is important for querying arbitrary XML data sources and is expected to join SQL as a widely used query language. XQuery does not provide an API for invocation from application environments, and the JSR would provide such an API for Java programs, Oracle said. A JSR serves as a request for submitting technologies as proposed standards for the Java programming language within the Java Community Process (JCP). Software Development