Oracle made a major contribution to the open source community today, announcing it has contributed the XQilla XQuery engine code to the open source community under an Apache 2.0 license.

XQilla is a technology built upon XQuery and XPatch 2.0 for developers who need to create XML-based applications. XQuery is the language originally created for querying XML data, and can be used to combine documents, Internet content, databases, and Web-based content. It removes the need for developers to produce large amounts of C++ of Java code, and can be used to gather information for use in an online Internet community or to convert information from XML to XHTML.

Under the Apache 2.0 license and available via SourceForge, programmers will have full access to the source code while companies will be able to use the community-created upgrades.

Oracle hopes its contribution to the open source community will aid developers in the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Enterprise Content Management sectors of the market. XQuilla 2.0 will be Oracle's next major release of its XML technology, though an official release date has not been announced.