Michael Kay has released version 9.0.0.4 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor for Java and .NET. This is a bug fix release. "Although there's a steady stream of new bugs and fixes, I think they are largely problems that affect very few users, so unless you know you're affected by one of the bugs, there's no great urgency to upgrade to the latest maintenance build."
Saxon is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later (or .NET) is required. Saxon 9.0B 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 9.0 SA 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."
In related news, the fourth edition of Kay's classic XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference is scheduled to be released on April 28th. It's in hardcover, over 1300 pages, and is currently available for $37.79 at Amazon.
