This week I'm at Software Development Best Practices in Boston. I'll be talking about a number of topics including Effective XML, Testing XML, JUnit 4, Human Factors in API Design, Next Generation Web Clients, and GUI Testing with Abbot and Costello. Updates may be a little slow here in the meantime.
I've posted beta 8 of Jaxen 1.1, an open source (modified BSD license) XPath 1.0 engine for Java that is adaptable to many different object models including XOM, JDOM, DOM, and dom4j. Jaxen was originally written by James Strachan and Bob McWhirter. Beta 8 expands the JavaDoc, cleans up and optimizes various parts of the code base, and addresses a couple of areas where Jaxen wasn't correctly implementing the XPath specification. It also makes it a little easier not to include the Jaxen extension functions if you don't want to.
The only remaining known bugs involve namespace handling in the JDOM navigator. Don't be fooled by the "beta" designation. This release has many fewer bugs and is much more conformant to the XPath specification than the official 1.0 release. We'll probably get around to calling it 1.1 final sometime later this year after doing more work on testing, documentation, performance, and code cleanup. However, there's no reason to wait for that. If you're using Jaxen, you should upgrade to this beta.