A posting from Tinny Ng (IBM Toronto Laboratory) announces the release of Xerces-C 1.5.0 with partial support for the W3C XML Schema Recommendation. The developers intend to update this package until it implements all the functionality of the current XML Schema Recommendation. Apache Xerces-C is a "validating XML parser written in a portable subset of C++. Xerces-C makes it easy to give your application the ability to read and write XML data. A shared library is provided for parsing, generating, manipulating, and validating XML documents. Xerces-C is faithful to the XML 1.0 recommendation and associated standards (DOM 1.0, DOM 2.0. SAX 1.0, SAX 2.0, Namespaces). The parser provides high performance, modularity, and scalability. Source code, samples and API documentation are provided with the parser. For portability, care has been taken to make minimal use of templates, no RTTI, no C++ namespaces and minimal use of #ifdefs. In addition to the implementation of XML Schema subset, Xerces-C 1.5.0 offers: (1) Mac OS X command line configuration and build support; (2) Enabled libWWW NetAccessor support under UNIX; (3) Enabled COMPAQ Tru64 UNIX machines to build xerces-c with gcc; (4) Updated support for SCO UnixWare 7 [gcc]; (5) Experimental IDOM; (6) Support for ICU 1.8; (6) Documentation in PDF format; (7) Bug fixes and performance improvement." Xerces-C 1.5.0 source code and binaries are available for AIX, HP11, Linux, Solaris, Windows.

Xerces parser applications: "Xerces has rich generating and validating capabilities. The parser is used for: (1) Building XML-savvy Web servers; (2) Building next generation of vertical applications that use XML as their data format; (3) On-the-fly validation for creating XML editors; (4) Ensuring the integrity of e-business data expressed in XML; (5) Building truly internationalized XML applications."