May 2008 Report
Xerces-J
Xerces-J was forutnate to be awarded one Google Summer of Code project for 2008. Starting this month Hiranya Jayathilaka (the new student) will be working on [type alternatives|http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xmlschema11-1-20070830/#cTypeAlternative] for the XML Schema 1.1 implementation which has been under development on a branch in SVN.
Xerces-C
Due to potentially frequent changes that may be required to support various scripting languages it was decided on the c-dev mailing list to split the swig directory into two seperate distributions: Xerces-SWIG (SWIG interface definitions) and Xerces-P (Perl-specific part).
The work is underway to align the DOM XPath interfaces defined by Xerces-C++ with the implementation of XPath 2 provided by the XQilla project. This should allow out-of-the box integration (currenly requires patching of Xerces-C++ 2.8.0) as well as cleaner user code (no casts) once Xerces-C++ 3.0.0 is released.
The first beta for the upcoming 3.0.0 release helped identify a number of problems which were addressed. A number of bugs have been fixed since the beta release. The plan is to release another beta in the 1-2 months timeframe once the XQilla-related work is completed as well as the remaining important bugs are fixed.
Xerces-P
Xerces-P split out of the Xerces-C SVN repository back into it's own space, as well as breaking into a new xerces-swig SVN space in order to contain the Perl-independent parts of the SWIG bindings for Xerces.
Xerces-P had a lot of activity this quarter getting ready for a 3.0 joint release of Xerces-P and Xerces-C. A lot of bug-fixing and improvements were added. First 3.0 Beta will be released in first week of May.
The Xerces-P project is suffering from a lack of help, and a lack of oversight. It is hoped that by having the language independent bindings, it will attract more assistance from other language communities such as Ruby, Tcl, and Python...