Announcing SAXON Version 4.1

Date:     Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:52:59 -0000
From:     Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@icl.com>
To:       xsl-list@mulberrytech.com, "'xml-dev@ic.ac.uk'" <xml-dev@ic.ac.uk>
Subject:  ANNOUNCING SAXON 4.1

The latest release of SAXON is available on:

http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/saxon.html.

This release focuses on support for XSL. SAXON now supports about 85% of the XSL transformation language draft. The added-value features you might find interesting are:

Support for multiple output files. SAXON allows you to split a single input document into lots of linked output documents.
Close integration of Java and XSL code. You can invoke Java element handlers from XSL, and XSL element handlers from Java. You can also use the full XSL syntax for match patterns and select patterns from within your Java code.
SAXON Stylesheets produce a text file, not a tree. This means you can use them to produce CSV files, EDI messages, SQL scripts, or any number of formats that don't use angle-bracket syntax. Of course you can also produce XML and HTML output.
SAXON Stylesheets can process the source document in serial mode. This means the document doesn't have to fit in memory, and output can start appearing before the input is all available. The XSL constructs available are a pure subset of those used in "navigational" mode, and sufficient to perform a wide variety of processing tasks (notably, splitting the large document into small pieces).
SAXON Stylesheets are extensible (anyone remember what the X in XSL stands for?). By writing Java element handlers you can define additional elements that extend the standard XSL vocabulary, and then use these in any stylesheet. I show an example where I use this to create a syntax for SQL Stylesheets: this contains <sql:connect> and <sql:insert> elements so that a style sheet can now be used to load XML data into any relational database.

As a free bonus the new release of SAXON includes a new version of my DTDGenerator tool, which generates a DTD from a specimen document. The new version attempts to detect patterns in the ordering of child elements for a given parent, and also examines the syntax of attribute values in greater detail. Further information about DTDGenerator is on:

http://home.iclweb.com/icl2/mhkay/dtdgen.html.

Have fun!

Michael Kay

XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list

Prepared by Robin Cover for the The SGML/XML Web Page archive.

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