May 2012 Report

Xerces-J

There were several students who expressed an interest in GSoC this year and we were fortunate again to have a student with a project proposal that was accepted. For GSoC, Shakya Wijerama will be working on a solution to allow for validation against multiple XML schemas with the same namespace.

With XML Schema 1.1 becoming a W3C Recommendation there appears to be more interest from users in what we've done in Xerces-J. We still need to figure out what remaining work needs to be done to move the support from its beta state and into the main release stream.

We are aware that the Apache Lucene project had been distributing its own patched version of Xerces to resolve a problem they were having. The Xerces JIRA issue reported for the problem continues to remain open today because we have been waiting for a consumable test case that would be consumable by the Xerces developers was never to be provided. The initial reporter's test was 20 GBs, too large for many to download and analyze. Apparently Lucene has since implemented a work around and stopped distributing their own Xerces version. We certainly welcome the Lucene developers engagement if they're still interested in a resolution. With more direct communication on the mailing lists this issue might have already been resolved a long time ago.

Mailing list traffic has been moderate (and increasingly lately in part due to GSoC); about 140+ posts on the j-dev and j-users lists since the beginning of March.

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