ANN: New SAXON Release

Tue Jun 16 11:55:07 BST 1998

SAXON is a Java class library providing a range of services
on top of SAX; it is particularly useful for writing
applications to process specific document types. I have used
it to do a wide variety of XML-to-XML and XML-to-HTML
transformations, and to load XML data into relational
databases.

I have produced a new release which is available for
download from
http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/saxon.html

Changes in this version:
* Substantial performance improvements (factor of 2 to 3)
* Greatly improved error/exception handling
* Minor bug fixes and documentation improvements
* A new (experimental) integration with the DOM, as
implemented by FREE-DOM.

The idea of the FREE-DOM integration is that you can now
write the same event-driven SAXON application to process a
document serially, from raw parser events, or to do a
traversal of the DOM tree. The only difference is that in
the latter case, additional facilities are available, for
example the ability to update the DOM and generate a new XML
document from it.

(Incidentally, this works by having a SAX driver that
traverses the DOM instead of parsing an input file. This is
probably a useful animal in its own right, outside the SAXON
context).

I have produced a number of ad-hoc XML applications using
SAXON and I feel the functionality has now stabilised to do
most of the things I find useful, including things like
sorting and automatic numbering of elements. Feedback from
others will be very welcome, however.

I have also re-released GedML, a SAXON application that
processes genealogical data encoded in XML. It is on
http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/gedml.html

Mike Kay, ICL
M.H.Kay at eng.icl.co.uk (work)
mhkay at iclweb.com (home)

PS: Congratulations to Don Park, who put just the hooks I
needed into FREE-DOM to enable the integration.

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