Quaere was initially intended as a demo for Anders Norås' talk on developing domain specific languages with plain old Java at JavaZone 2008. Anders' original idea was to demonstrate a simple application that resembled Microsoft's language integrated queries (LINQ). In the weeks before the JavaZone conference, the demo grew into a feature rich framework and Quaere was announced as an open source project at the conference. In September 2007 the project moved to the Codehaus.