February 2009 Report
Xerces-J
There was quite a bit of development since November, including more progress on the XML Schema 1.1 implementation, other schema features, the StAX event API and an implementation of the DOM Element Traversal API. The latter requires a new interface from the W3C. Hoping this can be included soon. See issues highlighted in the XML Commons report.
Still getting good help from the community on the XML Schema 1.1 work. Our former GSoC student is helping to improve the support for type alternatives and another is looking at the assertions support.
Xerces-C
No development activity to report.
Xerces-P
In some clean up work of the old XML project it was discovered that xml.apache.org/dist is still being used for publishing snapshots. A discussion was started to determine what should be done with these.
We are still having compilation problems with recent versions of Perl. We have gotten some help from outside developers who have given me a login to their private machines for testing. As soon as compilation is working again for recent Perl, we will make an official beta release of 3.0.
XML Commons
There was some discussion in December about creating a new component for SAX utilities, seeded with some existing utilities from Apache Tika. The Apache Commons project is also being considered as a possible home. For the time being the developers decided to move forward with a sandbox component over in the Commons project, also including works from Cocoon and Jackrabbit.
Xerces-J recently implemented the Element Traversal API and would like to add the W3C interface to XML Commons External. Apache Batik has already been shipping it. It was recently discovered by one of the developers that the interface isn't correctly licensed under the W3C Software License. At our request, the Web Applications Working Group appears to have fixed this issue, issuing an erratum against the specification. Once we hear official word, we plan to include the properly licensed copy of the source in XML Commons. More information is available here: http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/ElementTraversal/REC-ElementTraversal-20081222-errata.html#E1.
General
We finally got around to developing a proper top-level website for Xerces. Had a skeleton up there for years which wasn't too inviting. http://xerces.apache.org/ is now building with Forrest. Special thanks to Ashley Morgan for the logo. This is one of the wonderful things that came out of Google's GHOP contest.