April 05, 2005

Saxon 8.4 Now Available - Saxon.NET RC1 based on these bits will follow in the next few days

In a recent post to Saxon-Help Dr. Michael Kay announced the availability of Saxon 8.4 from the http://saxon.sourceforge.net project page. The announcement in its entirety is in the extended portion of this blog entry. Obviously there is a need to integrate the necessary Saxon.NET changes into this release and run through the testing processing to determine conformance. Hopefully this will mean a release no later than Friday of this week. I will update both here and on http://weblog.saxondotnet.org when it becomes available.

I have also updated the SVN repository and change the structure to conform more to the standard SVN recommended directory structure. You can view this at http://source.x2x2x.org/svn/x2x2x/saxon.net. Please note that the Saxon.NET-B-8.4-source folder does not contain any of the necessary changes to the source or additional files to build correctly with ikvmc. I plan that as an activity for this evening and tomorrow as at the moment I have some other deliverables that I need to get out ASAP! :D

Saxon-B 8.4 is available at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=29872

Saxon-SA 8.4 is available at http://www.saxonica.com/ (existing license keys
should continue to work).

The main benefit of this release is bug clearance. There are also various
updates to align with changes in the W3C specs (which are now on last-call,
and haven't changed much).

The more adventurous among you might like to experiment with the new "lazy
construction" mode. This delays construction of temporary trees until the
contents are actually needed, and means that under some circumstances they
don't need to be constructed at all. This is switched off by default as (a)
I think it needs more exposure before it becomes fully reliable, and (b) the
performance results have yet to be fully assessed.

I've started to try and distinguish in the JavaDoc which interfaces I regard
as part of the "public stable Saxon API", which interfaces are purely
internal, and which have some kind of intermediate status, e.g. "for
experimental use only". Of course nothing can be guaranteed 100% stable, but
I want to do better than in the past.

The front page of the documentation included in the download, unfortunately,
describes it as version 8.3 - but the rest is up to date.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/