XML News from Saturday, October 28, 2006

Bruno Lowagie has released iText 1.4.6, an open source Java library for generating PDF, XML, HTML, and RTF documents. It can also parse XML documents and convert them into any of these formats. Pages of existing PDF files can be imported and copied to new PDF documents. iText is published under the Mozilla Public License. Java 1.4 or later is required.

Sonic Software has released Stylus Studio 2007 XML Enterprise Suite, a $895 payware XML editor for Windows. Features include:

• XML differencing
• XSLT debugging
• XSLT mapping
• XSLT profiling
• XSL:FO
• XQuery editing, mapping, and debugging.
• XML Schema Editor
• Document Type Definition (DTD) Editor
• XPath Evaluator
• XPath Expression Generator
• Web Service Call Composer
• UDDI Registry Browser
• Tools for mapping to and from XML documents, Web service data, relational data, and flat files
• Import/export utilities for RDBMS, XML, CSV, ADO, and flat files
• JSP Editor
• RenderX XEP Personal Edition XSL-FO processor bundled
• An XPath Query Editor,
• Java APIs for accessing EDI, X12, EDIFACT and other legacy data formats.

New features in this release include

• XML Pipeline support
• An XML report designer
• Data Conversion APIs

Hermitech Laboratory has released Formulator 3.7 MathML Suite, a $40 payware MathML editor. They've also published free MathML rendering plugins for Internet Explorer and XML Spy.

The Apache Web Services Project has posted version 0.5.2 of JaxMe 2, an open source implementation of the Java API for XML Binding. Quoting from the web page,

JaxMe 2 is an open source implementation of JAXB, the specification for Java/XML binding.

A Java/XML binding compiler takes as input a schema description (in most cases an XML schema but it may be a DTD, a RelaxNG schema, a Java class inspected via reflection or a database schema). The output is a set of Java classes:

• A Java bean class compatible with the schema description. (If the schema was obtained via Java reflection, then the original Java bean class.)
• An unmarshaller that converts a conforming XML document into the equivalent Java bean.
• Vice versa, a marshaller that converts the Java bean back into the original XML document.

In the case of JaxMe, the generated classes may also

• Store the Java bean into a database. Preferably an XML database like eXist, Xindice, or Tamino, but it may also be a relational database like MySQL. (If the schema is sufficiently simple. :-)
• Query the database for bean instances.
• Implement an EJB entity or session bean with the same abilities.

This release adds an xmlCatalog element and fixes assorted bugs.