XML News from Wednesday, December 22, 2004

The XML Apache Project has released Xalan-C++ 1.9, an open source XSLT processor written in standard C++. Version 1.9 supports memory management, enables iterative processing, can pool all text node strings, and fixes assorted bugs.


Michael Kay has released Saxon 8.2, an implementation of XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery in Java. Saxon 8.2 is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 is required. Saxon 8.2B 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 8.2SA 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." Version 8.2 adds support for XOM, supports the JAXP 1.3 XPath and schema validation APIs, improves performance in a few areas, and is more backwards compatible with XSLT 1.0 stylesheets. Upgrades from 8.x are free.