There is no shortage of interesting problems left to solve in Jaql, and we welcome help on it. These include:

• Enable bindings to other programming languages besides Java

so Jaql clients and functions can be written in, say, Python or JavaScript.

• Investigate how schema may be specified for JSON data and how it can be exploited

for storage and query processing.

• There are many ways to improve in query rewriting. Projection push-down is a good place to start.

• Extend the notion of job tracking, load balancing, and restarting to Jaql queries.

• How to deal with exceptions both in IO and the Jaql interpreter.

• Performance testing and performance improvements.

One of the big things we are working on these days is a drastic simplification to the query syntax. Please check-out our slides that we presented at the Hadoop User Group on 10/16/2008 ... all feedback greatly appreciated and welcome!