| libxml 2.6.7 and libxslt 1.1.3 released
Daniel Veillard has recently released updated versions of
libxml
and libxslt. An important security fix is included, along
with some improvements and optimizations and bug fixes.
The libxml 2.6.7 release contains a security fix for a
"potentially severe buffer overflow error" (actually fixed in the
libxml 2.6.6 release), other bug fixes, and some XPath and DTD
validation optimizations.
About the libxslt 1.1.3 release, Veillard writes:
The first part of the release
is a number of bug fixes (thanks William); the second part is
a relatively consequent change where I started using and
sharing dictionaries for most of the static strings involved
in stylesheets and transformation context; this offers a lot
of potential performance improvement but that work is only at
its beginning and it introduces an instability factor; I may
need further APIs to fully benefit from those
changes
He suggests that developers check their applications against
the new version to see if the dictionaries change introduces any
problems.
The libxml site provides pages summarizing libxml2 changes and libxslt changes,
listing changes release-by-release. A complete libxml2 changelog and a complete libxslt changelog are also available.
About libxml and libxslt
libxml and libxslt have become de facto standard
XML-processing libraries around which an ever-increasing number of
developers seem to be building their XML applications.
Both
libraries:
- are written in portable C, "sticking closely to ANSI
C/POSIX for easy embedding"
- in addition to being complete implementions of the core XML
and XSLT specs, support a wide range of XML-related
technologies, including:
- Relax NG
- XInclude
- XML Catalogs (and Oasis SGML catalogs)
- XPointer
- EXSLT
- W3C XML Schema
...and more
- include bindings for many other programming languages,
including Python, C++, Perl, PHP, Tcl, Ruby, and Java
- have well-documented, stable APIs
- are very actively maintained -- Veillard responds very
quickly to bug reports he receives, and he welcomes patches
(releases typically include a number of changes incorporated
from patches submitted by other developers)
- have been shown, through benchmark testing and widespread
actual use, to be among the fastest full-featured XML-parsing
and XSLT-transformation solutions currently available
- are available as packages for many Linux distributions and
for the Cygwin environment, and as pre-compiled binaries for a
number of other platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, and
Solaris (and if you want to run them on a platform for which
packages or pre-compiled binaries are not available, you can
easily compile and build them from source)
- are bundled with a command-line XML parser, xmllint (built
on top of libxml2) and a command-line XSLT engine, xsltproc
(built on top of libxslt) that are also among the fastest and
most fully-featured applications in their class
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