The Apache XML
Project's Xalan development team has made available a
version 2.0.D07 developer's release of its Xalan-Java XSLT
engine (in both zip and tgz formats) and indicated that "a finalized
2.0 release will be next if this release does well in beta
trials".
A What's New page at the Xalan site gives a
high-level description of Xalan-Java 2.0 goals:
Xalan-Java 2 represents a fundamental redesign of
Xalan. The primary objective of this redesign is an
easier-to-use, more understandable, and more modular API
that encourages wider participation in its ongoing
development by the open-source XML developer community, and
that lends itself to "streaming," the production of
transformation output while the input is still being
parsed.
And a design document provides further details:
The main goals of this redesign are to:
- Make the design and code more understandable by
Open Source people.
- Reduce code size and complexity.
- By simplifying the code, make optimization
easier.
- Make modules generally more localized, and less
tangled with other modules.
- Conform to the javax.xml.transform (TrAX
[Transformations for XML]) interfaces.
- Increase the ability to incrementally produce
the result tree.
The Xalan development team has not yet made available any
metrics on the performance improvements in Xalan-Java 2.0.
Results of comparative benchmarks testing typically show the 1.2 version
underperforming relative to the two other most widely used
open-source XSLT engines, James Clark's XT
and Michael Kay's Saxon.
Significant performance improvements in
Xalan are important, given that Apache's Web
publishing framework, Apache Cocoon, relies on Xalan for dynamic
transformations of XML content.
Discussions about Xalan take place on the xalan-dev mailing
list (archive); subscribe by e-mailing a blank
message to xalan-dev-subscribe@xml.apache.org.
Related stories: