I've updated the XML Conferences page. There are definitely fewer of these than there used to be. At least one company that did several XML shows a year has gone out of business, one has dropped out of the market completely, and two are down to less than one show a year.
For myself, I'll be chairing the XML track at Software Development 2004 West again next year. We've got a good program with two new tutorials from Jason Hunter and Eric van der Vlist, and 12 seminars of which eleven are completely new at this show. But it's still only one track in a larger show. I'll probably attend WWW 2004, mostly since it's in New York and therefore convenient and cheap for me. I ma submit a poster on XOM design principles or some such. And for once I've got a good idea for an Extreme Markup Languages paper far enough in advance that I may be able to get back to Montreal this year. But even with all that, it looks like I'll be doing a lot less speaking in 2004 than in the past.
Sam Tregar has released XML::Validator::Schema 1.05, a Perl module that validates XML documents against a partial subset of the W3C XML schema language. It is implemented as a SAX filter on top of XML::SAX. 1.05 support many more simple types.
Andy Clark has posted a new release of his CyberNeko Tools for the Xerces Native Interface (NekoXNI) that fixes various of bugs in the HTML and DTD parsers. Other tools in the package include a generic XML pull parser, a RELAX NG validator, and a DTD to XML converter.
The Apache Project has released Cocoon 2.1.3, an open source "web development framework built around the concepts of separation of concerns and component-based web development. Cocoon implements these concepts around the notion of 'component pipelines', each component on the pipeline specializing on a particular operation. This makes it possible to use a Lego(tm)-like approach in building web solutions, hooking together components into pipelines without any required programming." Cocoon can assemble data from many sources including filesystems, SQL databases, LDAP, native XML databases, and SAP. It can customize the output to generate HTML, WML, PDF, SVG, and RTF from the same inputs. Processes it supports include XSL transformation and XInclude resolution. Cocoon can run as a servlet inside an existing web server or standalone through a commandline interface. 2.1.3 is primarily a bug fix release.
Bare Bones Software has released BBEdit 7.1. This is a free update for all 7.0 users. BBEdit is the $179 payware Macintosh text/HTML/XML/programmer's editor I normally use to write this page. New features in this release include secure FTP support and live preview for HTML files. Mac OS X 10.2 or later is required. Mac OS 9 is not supported.
Brendan Macmillan has posted version 2.1.4 of Java Serialization for XML (JSX)
2, a library for converting Java objects into streams of XML
and reading the objects back from the streams. To use it, replace
ObjectOutputStream with
JSX.ObjectWriter and ObjectInputStream
with JSX.ObjectReader. This release adds an XML schema of the XML format for classes serialized with JSX.