May 2009 Report

Xerces-J

Xerces-J was fortunate again to be awarded one Google Summer of Code project for 2009. Starting this month Richard Kelly (the new student) will be working on support for Unicode normalization checking and normalization.

In March and April we elected two new committers: Hiranya Jayathilaka and Mukul Gandhi. Hiranya was our Google Summer of Code (GSoC) student for 2008 and has continued to be active on the project by helping with the XML Schema 1.1 effort. Mukul has been one of the more active developers lately, completing the bulk of the support for XML Schema 1.1 assertions and getting it to work with both the Eclipse (a.k.a. Psychopath) and Saxon XPath 2.0 processors. With these contributions we're now getting close to a point where we could have a preview release containing features from the XML Schema 1.1 working drafts.

In the last few months there were a couple interesting threads on the development mailing list. The first was regarding the number of XML Schema APIs around the ASF (in particular the ones in Xerces and WS-Commons) and whether the projects could converge on a common API. After this discussion it became quite clear these APIs serve different use cases and that there is indeed value in maintaining these as separate efforts. The second thread was a revival of the discussion on moving up to Java 5 for its language features and class library enhancements. The current thought is to create a branch for Java 5 development and have dual releases targeted for Java 1.3 and 5. This would allow users on Java 1.3 and 1.4 to continue getting this support, while providing an optimized version for users on Java 5 and 6. We plan to consult with the user community again before making any decisions on this front.

Xerces-C

Xerces-C++ 3.0.1 was released on February 19th. Since then it's been moderately busy on the mailing lists though fairly quiet on the development front.

Xerces-P

Nothing in particular to report. There was no development activity over the reporting period.

XML Commons

In XML Commons External a few bug fixes and improvements were applied to the JAXP 1.3 and 1.4 branches. Nothing else notable to report.

General

Gareth has again expressed his intent to step down as PMC chair. We plan to start the process for selecting a new one.