XML News from Sunday, December 21, 2008

Michael Kay has released versions 9.1.0.5 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor for Java and .NET. This is a bug fix release.

Saxon is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later (or .NET) is required. Saxon 9.1B 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 9.1 SA is a £300.00 payware. According to Kay,

The most obvious difference between Saxon-SA and Saxon-B is that Saxon-SA is schema-aware: it 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-standing XML Schema validator.

In addition Saxon-SA incorporates some advanced extensions and optimizations not available in the Saxon-B product: