May 2008 Report
Xerces-J
Xerces-J was fortunate 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 for the XML Schema 1.1 implementation which has been under development on a branch in SVN.
We received several patches in April for improving memory management in the DOM implementation. These should help orphaned DOM objects to get garbage collected sooner. Just waiting for the contributor to get their CLA faxed in before committing them.
We're getting requests again to put our jars in Apache's Maven repository. Since none of the Xerces developers are familiar with Maven or the repository we're going to ask again for help from the community to create the POMs and upload the jars to the appropriate place(s). For communities which don't use Maven it would be nice if the repository managers took care of this.
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 separate 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 (currently 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...
XML Commons
Nothing much to report. Just a few posts to the mailing list on the behaviour of the resolver. One minor improvement was made to xml-commons-external to allow applications to more easily clear their JAXP system property settings.