Re: [xml-dev] Which latest and greatest XML Standards Should I UseFor XM

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

>> I don't know of an open source XSLT 2 processor that's easily used on
>> Linux from Perl. Saxon is the nearest, and you can get reasonable
>> performance if you run it with nailgun, which keeps a spare JVM started
>> all the time to avoid the startup cost, but it will still run in a
>> separate process. A few people have tried moving libxml towards XSLT 2,
>> but have not collaborated with each other, and in any case it'd probably
>> be better to start with getting XSLT 2 (and 3) into webkit.
>
> It seems in general XSLT hasn't received that much attention in 
> contrast to XQuery. Might well be because of all the database 
> approaches in which XQuery is naturally predominant as an 
> SQL-replacement.
>
Depends whether you mean user attention or implementor attention. I 
reckon XSLT is used about 10 times as much as XQuery (*). On the 
implementation side, everyone and their grandmother implemented XSLT 
1.0, but justifying the investment in implementing XSLT 2.0 has proved 
much tougher. There are in fact 7 or 8 implementations of XSLT 2.0, 
which is a lot more than for many other popular programming languages, 
but there is a major gap in coverage in the PHP/Lamp space covered by 
libxml. Basically that's an area where people expect their software to 
be free, and I have yet to understand how demand for free software 
translates into supply.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

(*) based on metrics such as google searches, book sales, StackOverflow 
questions, etc etc.