August 03, 2005

Saxon 8.5 now available

As already mentioned several times I'm working on a project that keeps me from staying connected to my email on a consistent basis. As such this news is almost 24 hours old... sorry for the delay!

[Please see extended portion of post for the official announcement from Dr. Kay]

Regarding Saxon.NET: With limited time I have held off from releasing anything new in this space for a couple of months. But with a new release of Saxon (and as such some reassurance that it should be another 3 months before a new Saxon release hits the streets) comes the need for a Saxon.NET refresh. I can't get to this immediatelly but as long as there are no major hacking needs I should be able to get something out before the end of business (US: West Coast) today.

I'll keep you posted.

[Dr. Kay's announcement]

Saxon 8.5 is available. I don't announce every new release on this list, but
this is the first for four months and there's a lot that's new, so I thought
I would take the liberty.

The exciting things in this release are in the commercial version, Saxon-SA
8.5. These include:

* hash join optimization for both XSLT and XQuery (can give fantastic
speed-up when processing large documents)

* a binary disk representation of validated source documents, reducing the
document loading costs when the same document is used repeatedly by many
transformations

* a mechanism for sequential XSLT processing of input documents without
reading the whole document into memory, making it feasible to process very
large documents provided the transformation is serial in nature

There are also lots of goodies in Saxon-B, including:

* Unicode normalization

* Ability for the collection() function to process a directory, for example

collection("dir?recurse=yes;select=*.html;parser=org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Pars
er")

returns all the *.html files in the given directory, expanded recursively,
using John Cowan's TagSoup parser to convert them on-the-fly to XML

* Similar ability to use URI query parameters in the document() and doc()
functions (if enabled from the command line)

There are large numbers of small changes (listed in the documentation) which
I would recommend you take the time to read after downloading the software.

And of course, all known bugs are cleared.

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