A significant announcement today... Saxon-JS 2 is released!
This is a big development for Saxon on the _javascript_ platform. The most obvious changes are:
* The product is now available on Node.js as well as in the browser
* The product now includes an XSLT compiler as well as a run-time, so it is no longer restricted to users who have purchased a Saxon-EE license.
But there's also a vast number of smaller changes:
* A serializer with a very high level of conformance to the W3C specifications
* A richer _javascript_ API both for XSLT transformations and XPath evaluation
* Support for higher-order functions
* General filling in of remaining conformance gaps, taking us to 99.9% coverage of XSLT 3.0 and XPath 3.1.
* Significant performance enhancements.
We're very excited by the potential of this product. Node.js has become a very popular platform for high-performance web services, and until now it has had rather poor support for XML technologies generally, and XSLT in particular. Saxon-JS on Node.js is effectively a brand new XSLT processor, which can now operate completely independently of the Java product. Our initial performance results are very encouraging indeed.
We're making Saxon-JS available at no charge (but it's not open source). We'll be offering a subscription package for enterprise users that will offer source code, debugging aids, and functional add-ons in due course (please let us know if you're interested: that will help us in designing the service). But for the moment, please download it and try it out. For Node.js, it's on npm with package names "xslt3" and "saxon-js". For the browser, you can download from
www.saxonica.com/saxon-js -- where you will also find full documentation, delivered (of course) using Saxon-JS itself.
Debbie Lockett and John Lumley have devoted the last couple of years to this project, and deserve a big round of applause.
