August 2008 Report

Xerces-J

Development continues on the XML Schema 1.1 implementation. In addition to the help we've been getting through our Google Summer of Code student we have a new volunteer (Mukul Gandhi) who has made significant progress on an implementation of the assertions feature. In tandem with the JAXP 1.4 API updates in XML Commons a number of JAXP 1.4 features (mostly schema validation related) have been contributed to the trunk. No releases this quarter but hoping to wrap one up some time in the fall.

Xerces-C

More work has been done on the 3.0.0 code base in preparation for the final release planned for mid-September. In particular, all public interfaces and a large portion of the implementation have been made 64-bit safe, a number of important XML Schema bugs have been fixed (##other interpretation, large maxOccurs, etc), all diagnostics messages have been reviewed and cleaned up, and a number of optimizations have been performed in the DOM and SAX parsers. This all culminated with the release of a second beta for 3.0.0 on the 24th of July.

Xerces-P

Xerces-P is preparing for it's first beta release of the 3.0 codebase. Due to last minute API changes in Xerces-C, Xerces-P no longer compiled. When fixed many tests for NodeIterators and TreeWalkers failed. The beta won't be released until these fixes are made. I am still communicating with for help integrating the Xerces-P/Xerces-C build process along the lines requested by the debian maintainer, Jay.

XML Commons

Activity in XML Commons picked up in June with some renewed interest in the development of the resolver component. We have one new contributor who has provided several patches for the resolver which we've been gradually reviewing. Also in June, the trunk of xml-commons-external has been upgraded to the JAXP 1.4 APIs. We had proposed to do this way back in 2006 but had an open issue with the authoring of the StAX APIs. In the time since we started the discussion the Geronimo folks wrote their own copy of the StAX API from scratch. We decided to use these sources as the basis for the StAX API in XML Commons.