January 03, 2005

This is HUGE!

If your a Java developer looking to migrate your code to .NET (or simply want to move from Java to .NET and back again without even thinking twice) Jeroen Frijter's recently posted his New Years "gift" to the development community fixing all sorts of interesting bugs that could have a fairly significant impact on performance.

But this is not the most exciting part. Part of what has kept the size of the Saxon.NET.dll up and somewhat "dirty" with non-Saxon class files was the fact that Jeroen, for various reasons, had decided to hold off from including the GNU JAXP project files from the ikvm.gnu.classpath.dll file. As such, to bring Saxon.NET "to life" I needed to include these files as part of the build process (and subsequently as part of the dll.) Well, that is no longer the case as Jeroen has featured as the first in a long list of bug fixes and overall improvements for the latest build of the IKVM.NET project the following:

Sync'ed with GNU Classpath cvs (IKVM.GNU.Classpath now contains GNU JAXP XML processing library). You can now run Eclipse without having to add the xml stuff to the bootclasspath: eclipse -vm c:\ikvm\bin\ikvm.exe

As you can also see from this entry you can now run Eclipse on .NET a little easier as well which definitely brings a whole new level of ideas flooding into my head (uh oh! ;)

I haven't even had a just to unzip the file and run a new build (using the 8.1.1 class files for now) but that is my next process. Actually, the whole reason for visiting Jeroen's weblog was to verify the link I had added to the new Saxon.NET project weblog was set correctly -- the blog is actually not even finished (currently in process) but this seems as good a time as any to let you all know that you can now access the main project site at http://www.saxondotnet.org (still not updated -- that's next) and more importantly the official project blog at http://weblog.saxondotnet.org which will give you immeidatte access to all the latest and greatest from the Saxon.NET project and community as well as an easier place to find quick answers to your development questions. Please give me an hour or two before you "remind" me that the download links don't go anywhere, etc... :D

Hopefully I can run a quick build using the 8.1.1 source minus the JAXP files and have things simply work. If so (and I have no doubt they will) then I will post this updated build with some sample code on the project blog as soon as its available. I'll notify you here when it is.

Cheers!