Scott Boag announced a first release of the TRaX and XML Serializer APIs.

Presented as "a good start on a vendor neutral API that all implementers can eventually agree upon", these two APIs define how a XSLT transformation can be called and controlled (TraX) and the SAX based API used to pipe the result into a Java method.

Extending the scope of these APIs, Boag states that:

"While this interface is modeled on the XSLT process, it should be generic enough to use with many types of transformations besides XSLT. TRaX uses and is dependent on SAX2. TRaX is a Java API right now, but it would be great to get a C++, COM, and Perl version as well."

Although there is no explicit list of vendors or developers supporting the initiative, Boag expresses "many many thanks to Mike Kay, Oracle, Sun, Assaf Arkin and Keith Visco" and we can assume that the new APIs should be supported at least by Xalan, Saxon and Oracle.

The new site, temporarily hosted by Exolab, is hosting a CVS server and a mailing list - "Medium volume (possibly more than 5 messages a day) mailing list dedicated to the developers of TraX" - has been created.

The XML community is invited to join this effort:

"I sincerely hope that the XML community will join in on this work, so that we can create the best possible API. You don't have to be an implementor, but you probably want to have good familiarity with XML, and have used some of the XSLT processor APIs out there."