XML News from Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Michael Kay has released version 8.7 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor. This release is now availoable for .NET as well as Java. According to Kay,

The porting of Saxon to .NET was pioneered by M. David Peterson, Pieter Siegers Kort, and others, and the process has now been brought in-house within Saxonica. Saxon is written in Java, and the same source code is used for both products. The port is achieved by cross-compiling the Java code to MSIL using the IKVMC compiler developed by Jeroen Frijters, and using a combination of classes from the GNU ClassPath library and the .NET Framework library for run-time support.

Saxon 8.7 on .NET goes beyond previous Saxon.NET releases by providing greater integration with the .NET platform: in particular the System.Xml parser and utilities. It also provides a brand-new API designed to match the stylistic conventions of .NET and to provide a uniform approach to XSLT, XQuery, XPath, and XML Schema processing.

Saxon is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later (or .NET) is required. Saxon 8.7B is an open source product published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0 that "implements the 'basic' conformance level for XSLT 2.0 and XQuery." Saxon 8.7SA is a £250.00 payware version that "allows stylesheets and queries to import an XML Schema, to validate input and output trees against a schema, and to select elements and attributes based on their schema-defined type. Saxon-SA also incorporates a free-standard XML Schema validator. In addition Saxon-SA incorporates some advanced extensions not available in the Saxon-B product. These include a try/catch capability for catching dynamic errors, improved error diagnostics, support for higher-order functions, and additional facilities in XQuery including support for grouping, advanced regular expression analysis, and formatting of dates and numbers."