XML News from Thursday, June 30, 2005

I've posted the second beta release of XOM 1.1, my free-as-in-speech (LGPL) dual streaming/tree-based API for processing XML with Java. Version 1.1 maintains backwards compatibility with XOM 1.0 while adding a number of important new features including XPath queries, document subset canonicalization, exclusive XML canonicalization, external XSLT parameters, and xml:id support. The API is now considered to be reasonably stable, and probably won't change before 1.1 final. Beta 2 is primarily a bug fix release. NUmerous bugs have been fixed in XPath. In addition a couple of other random issues have been fixed including namespace handling in SAX conversion and attirbute parentage in copied elements. This release probably introduces a lot of bugs in serialization with Unicode Normalization Form C (NFC), though as yet I haven't proved that. Addressing this will be a major focus for beta 3. If anyone has test cases that demonstrate incorrect handling of NFC, I'd appreciate it if you'd send those my way. Beta 2 also make some optimizations that should slightly decrease the memory footprint. XOM requires Java 1.2 or later and is published under the LGPL.