Wolfgang Meier of the Darmstadt University of Technology has posted the first beta of eXist 1.0 (after several earlier pre-beta releases), an open source native XML database that supports fulltext search. XML can be stored in either the internal, native XML-DB or an external relational database. The search engine has been designed to provide fast XPath queries, using indexes for all element, text and attribute nodes. The server is accessible through HTTP and XML-RPC interfaces and supports the XML:DB API for Java programming.
This beta release adds support for XQuery 1.0 including an XQueryServlet and XQueryGenerator for Cocoon that enable you to write web applications in XQuery. This release also improves locking and caching strategies, adds support for binary resources, and fixes numerous bugs. eXist is published under the LGPL.
Jason Hunter has posted beta 10/release candidate 1 of JDOM, a tree-based API for Processing XML with Java. The biggest change in this release is that there's a Parent interface that anstracts out the common functionality of
Element and Document and a Content superclass that abstracts out the common functionality of child nodes. Get your comments in on the new API now.
Jason hopes to release 1.0 in about 6 weeks.
Mikhail Grushinskiy has posted XMLStarlet 0.81, a comman line utility for Linux that exposes a lot of the functionality in libxml and libxslt including validation, pretty printing, and canonicalization. I have to test that last one. I've been looking for a tool to do this for a while now.