xml-dev - ANNOUNCING SAXON 4.1

[Kay Michael <Michael.Kay@icl.com>]

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

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