February 2006 Report

Xerces-J

The Xerces-J 2.8.0 release is planned for this month (February, 2006). Development items include features for disabling ID/IDREF, unparsed entity and identity constraint checking, a property for starting schema assessment from a specific type definition and enhancements to XML schema annotation support. We've had a few new volunteers come forward to help out with the effort who seem interested in becoming regular contributors. An up to date version of the release plan is available here.

Xerces-C

Planned work for the 3.0 release is still ongoing. Many bug fixes have gone in in the last 3 months. We hope to release a minor bug fix version for 2.7 and a 3.0 in the next quarter. A couple of the guys who started contributing last quarter continue to do so and we are getting more now people contributing bug reports as well as patches in some cases.

Xerces-P

We are preparing for a 2.7 release at the end of February. This release mirrors the Xerces-C 2.7 release from last year.

We are also preparing for a 3.0 co-release with Xerces-C, which will informally merge the two projects into the same codebase. A more formal merge of Xerces-C with all scripting language bindings (right now only Xerces-Perl, but could be extended to Xerces-Python, Xerces-Ruby easily thanks to SWIG) will take place later in 2006.