February 24, 2006

Saxon/Saxon.NET Version 8.7 Now Available (Both B and SA)

So its now official, and I can finally let the cat out of the bag!

As per Dr. Kays announcement earlier today, The Saxon.NET project has been officially absorbed into the offerings of Saxonica LTD, With direct support offered from none other than Dr. Kay himself. The official announcement is copied below.

When I started the Saxon.NET project with Pieter almost two years ago, I did so with one goal in mind: To transfer this project to Dr. Kay as soon as he felt the time was right. It was obvious to me then that the best way to do this was to keep the code base as close to the original as was possible such that the transition would be an easy one. While early on in the project there were various attempts at a conversion to a complete C# source base, with each release of IKVM.NET it became more and more obvious that attempting to both port the source to C# while attempting to keep up with each release of Saxon was completely unnecessary. Jeroen Frijters, Mark Wiellard, and the rest of the folks who have helped bring together IKVM.NET and the Classpath project deserve the credit for making all of this possible.

Thanks guys! Because of you, I can finally state:

Mission Complete :)

What's next?

Sleep. ;)

After that?

Following the suggestion of Dr. Kay, I plan to unveil the next stage of this project, that of a community-based "workshop"-styled research project in which anyone and everyone who so desires can get involved with playing around with new ideas, contributing code, ideas, or whatever else , of which, based on Dr. Kay's discretion at some point has the potential to find its way into the official Saxon code base.

Sound like fun? (If yes,) Excellent! More details to follow.

One other important piece of this: A lot of folks played a hand in making Saxon.NET a success story; a lot of those folks work for, or are in various ways (like the XML-MVP's) connected to Microsoft. Believe it or not, this project *COULD NOT* have been successful if it wasn't for the efforts of Microsoft. Of course, its not limited to just MS folks, but the list of MS folks who have contributed to this project in various forms will probably amaze a lot of you. This list will be included online and made available with the launch of the community workshop/research project mentioned above.

Its also nice to see that the general idea of creating a JAXP-influenced interface (One XML Source-type in, One XML Source-type out) has found its way into the final architecture that Dr. Kay designed from scratch. This always seemed like the right area to focus on, so I'm glad to see that he felt the same way. As he mentions in the announcment below, the final architecture is something thats a God-send to us .NET developers, and is something that even the JAXP-folks will without a doubt seek after in envy.

Great stuff! :D

Thanks to everyone who played a part in this project! As you can imagine, I'm pretty excited at the moment to both see this project make its way into the hands of its rightful owner, as well as the opportunities that are ahead. The fact that Dr. Kay has given me this extended opportunity to further extend the reach of the XSLT language and the Saxon product line, through a community-based interface is something I *TRULY* appreciate. This should be a lot of fun for everyone who chooses to get involved.

Thanks Dr. Kay!

The official announcement is below:

Saxon 8.7 is now available. Both Saxon-B and Saxon-SA (the schema-aware
product) are being made available simultaneously on the Java and .NET
platforms.

Delivering Saxon on .NET is an important development; many users have held
back from migrating to XSLT 2.0 because of the limited availability of
products or because they had constraints tying them to the .NET platform.
The new release goes considerably further than previous Saxon.NET releases:
it integrates much more closely with other .NET services such as the
System.Xml parser, and it provides a new API designed to fit in with the
stylistic conventions of the .NET framework. Also, because this release is
delivered by Saxonica, it has been through all the same tests as the Java
product, and the documentation is fully integrated.

I have to express my appreciation to Pieter Siegers Kort, M. David Peterson
and others who pioneered the approach that has been used to create this
product; and also to Jeroen Frijters who produced the IKVMC cross-compiler
on which the technology depends. The Saxon code is still written in 100%
Java, except for the new API front-end which is in C#. The Java code is
compiled as normal, and the byte-code is then translated into native MSIL
for the .NET platform using the IKVMC compiler. Run-time library services
are obtained partly from the GNU ClassPath library, and partly from the .NET
framework classes.

I'm quite pleased with the new API, which is documented at
http://www.saxonica.com/documentation/dotnetdoc/index.html (start with the
Processor class). I think it's a lot cleaner than either the JAXP or the
System.Xml.Xsl APIs, and adopts a uniform approach to compiling and running
XSLT, XQuery, XPath, and XML Schema. I may well port it back to the Java
product in due course.

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