Paul Brown (FiveSight Technologies, Inc.) announced the release of an 'XPath Tester' tool which provides a graphical test environment for XPath expressions. XPath Tester "is an XML productivity tool that wraps the XPath API in XalanJ2. It allows the user to load an XML document, enter a query, and see the resulting NodeSet match highlighted or the value displayed. The tool provides a real-time mode that will apply the query as you type. The Xalan-J2 XSLT Processor [Version 2.1.0] from the Apache XML Project is used as the underlying XPath engine. The tool is available for download as a single executable JAR file that can be run via double-click in Windows or via java -jar xpathtester_1_x.jar [x replaced by the appropriate digit)] on any platform." XPath Tester is made publicly available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Peter Flynn nominated the XPath Tester application for [first] prize as "Most Useful Tool."

XPath Tester usage: "Run the program and load an XML file. The 'real-time query' setting controls whether the query is evaluated as typed or only when the ENTER key is pressed. To set the context node (the "." in an XPath expression), click on the desired node in the tree..."

Apache Xalan "is an XSLT processor for transforming XML documents into HTML, text, or other XML document types. It implements the W3C Recommendations for XSL Transformations (XSLT) and the XML Path Language (XPath). It can be used from the command line, in an applet or a servlet, or as a module in other program. Xalan-Java version 2 recasts Xalan as an implementation of the TRaX (Transformation API for XML) interfaces, part of the Java API for XML Processing 1.1 Public Review 2. TRaX provides a modular framework and a standard API for performing XML transformations, and it utilizes system properties to determine which Transformer and which XML parser to use. Xalan-Java version 2 also builds on SAX 2, DOM level 2, and the XML parser API in Java API for XML Parsing 1.0. Xalan-Java version 2.1.0 includes the XSLTC translet compiler and runtime..."