February 2007 Report

Xerces-J

In November we released Xerces-J 2.9.0. As of this release, Xerces and Xalan now share a common serialization codebase. The DOM Level 3 serialization support which was in Xerces was migrated into the Xalan serializer and Xerces' native serializer was deprecated. After 2.9.0, things quieted down over the holiday season. A few bugs have been fixed which should bring Xerces-J into conformance with the XML 1.0 4th Edition Recommendation. Several users have requested that we put our jars in Apache's Maven repository. Since none of the Xerces developers are familiar with Maven or the repository we've asked for help from the community and found one volunteer who is willing to create the POMs and upload the jars.

Xerces-C

A wiki page has been set up to track the build status of Xerces-C on various platform; currently, only AIX has never been successful. Within the last week we have had what we hope to be the final drop of the beta of XInclude support. We need to integrate this with the codebase. A limited support for XPath querying has been added to the DOMDocument class, exposing the same engine used for checking the XML Schema identity constraints.

Xerces-P

There's been very little activity since November. Here's a bit of slightly old news, some of which missed the previous report... Xerces-P is now fully integrated as a sub-project of Xerces-C and as of the upcoming Xerces-C 3.0 release it will be official. Xerces-P is now being used by Xerces-C as the basis of a comprehensive regression test suite for the public API of Xerces-C. Also in progress is the use of the SWIG wrappers to create mappings for other languages such as C# and Ruby (Xerces-C# and Xerces-Ruby), but this work is in early alpha.

XML Commons

In November, we released xml-commons-external-1.3.04 (JAXP 1.3) and xml-commons-resolver-1_2 (XML Catalogs v1.1). These were the first official releases from XML Commons since 2003. In addition to fixing several bugs, xml-commons-external-1.3.04 added Java Language Bindings for SAC 1.3 (The Simple API for CSS), SMIL and SVG 1.1. These APIs were originally housed in the XML Graphics project. The major change in xml-commons-resolver-1_2 is the addition of support for OASIS XML Catalogs v1.1. We still have one more pending release: xml-commons-external-1.2.06 (JAXP 1.2) which we hope to get out soon.