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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
It has 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.
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