ANNOUNCE: AxKit 1.4

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

AxKit is an application server module for Apache, designed for building
web sites using server-side transformations of XML based content. It
contains many features for delivering the same content to different
devices, and also for building dynamic content for different devices. It
features a number of transformation and language modules including XSLT,
Apache XSP and XPathScript. AxKit also implements a high performance cache
architecture that ensures cached content can be delivered at close
to static HTML speeds.

AxKit 1.4 is a major milestone in the development of AxKit, with a very
large list of changes. AxKit is being used on a number of commercial
sites, such as AxKit.com, Take23.org, and PDAMD.com.

You can get AxKit from http://axkit.org/, or from your local CPAN
mirror.

AxKit is free software, and open source. You can choose either the
Artistic License, or the GNU Public License.

Full list of changes since AxKit 1.3:

 - Config directives no longer implemented by Apache::ExtUtils
 - New TaglibHelper module, makes writing XSP taglibs almost trivial.
 - Build checks for iconv library - should make things smoother on *BSD
 - Known bug in Filter provider is fixed
 - Major memory leak cleanup
 - Added LibXSLT language module (for use with XML::LibXSLT). This is
   over twice as fast as XML::Sablotron, and more compliant.
 - Added AxAddURIProcessor config directive
 - Added AxLogDeclines config directive (replaces PerlSetVar equivalent)
 - Added import_templates() to XPathScript
 - XSP now uses SAX to generate code
 - Sablot.pm allows you to set the outgoing mime type
 - Many fixes to AxKit.xs compiled directives (hopefully making it work
   for more people now)
 - Removed eval{} stuff around XML parsing in Provider.pm as it seemed to
   be causing segfaults in Perl 5.6.1
 - Fixes to LibXSLT language module to make it work with new versions of
   XML::LibXSLT (and the core libxslt library).
 - Cleaned up error handling, and error stylesheets significantly
 - Removed Storable from XPathScript (to get control of the segfaults)
 - Implemented has_changed() for all "cache" bits
 - Improved error handling with an AxStackTrace config directive
   allowing the Error Stylesheet to get a full stack trace.
 - Doc fixes to stop pod2man complaining.
 - AxKit now adds AxKit/Version to your Server string (for netcraft!)
 - Switched xml_string to pnotes so you can have binary nulls in the
   output (e.g. for PDFs).
 - Added some configuration tidbits to INSTALL
 - Much better (though not 100% there) test harness code
 - Major fixes to Makefile.PL (to work better on *BSD and Win32)
 - XML::Parser no longer needed if you have libxml2 installed. This will
   allow AxKit to work with Apaches that have expat enabled!
 - XSP pages can implement a has_changed() function, which allows you to
   control the caching of the results (can have significant performance
   increases on dynamic pages)
 - Providers responsible for returning declined (this allows for non-file
   providers to not end up in a 404 when doing e.g. passthru)
 - Added AxNoCache option to turn off caching on purpose.
 - split AxKit.xs into more managable files
 - Better error messages from CharsetConv (iconv)
 - Added a PDF slideshow builder called AxPoint
 - Sablot fix for changing content-type.
 - Much cleaner handling of character set conversions
 - AxKit::Apache->request() added (similar to Apache->request())
 - Cache maintains content-type more sanely.
 - Many, many minor bug fixes.

-- 
<Matt/>

    /||    ** Founder and CTO  **  **   http://axkit.com/     **
   //||    **  AxKit.com Ltd   **  ** XML Application Serving **
  // ||    ** http://axkit.org **  ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP  **
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