November 2006 Report

Xerces-J

In September we released Xerces-J 2.8.1 to roll up all of the bug fixes and minor improvements since the previous release. Work on the StAX implementation continues. In October we received a generous contribution from Lucian Holland containing an initial implementation of the StAX Event API along with several test cases. Since 2.8.1 we've also been working on the Xalan based DOM Level 3 serializer. This was just recently completed and contributed to Xalan-J. We've already migrated to it in SVN which clears the way for deprecating Xerces' native serializer in Xerces 2.9.0. There's been some discussion with the Xalan community about coordinating this release with the upcoming Xalan 2.7.1. If this were to happen it would probably occur later this month, shortly before the Xalan release.

Xerces-C / P

Xerces-P is now within Xerces-C. This means it is kept up to date as code changes and we have a very useful testing tool. Perl tests have now been written that cover the majority of the API. The new build system still needs testing on more platforms before the next release. We have had a code submission for XInclude but it still needs some work and we need to make a decision on whether to postpone this release or leave it until next.

XML Commons

The Xerces PMC and committers recently voted to accept the transfer of XML Commons from the XML project to Xerces. In September the community agreed on a plan to have three releases of the XML Commons components: xml-commons-external-1.2.06 (JAXP 1.2), xml-commons-external-1.3.04 (JAXP 1.3) and xml-commons-resolver-1_2 (XML Catalogs v1.1). It's been far too long since XML Commons had a release of these components. There are still a few odds and ends left but they are almost ready to go.