[ANN] Saxon 11.1

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

We are delighted to announce Saxon 11.1, a raft of new products covering three language platforms (SaxonJ, SaxonCS, and SaxonC), all built from the same source code. The software can be downloaded from the usual places (see www.saxonica.com) though a few corners of the website have yet to be updated.

For SaxonJ (Java), this is the first major release in nearly two years. There's a long list of detailed changes that you can find in the documentation, but the main highlights are:

* New functions and syntax extensions, some of them experimental. Some are very simple, for example, "A otherwise B" selects A if it exists, otherwise it selects B. Some are more complex and powerful, such as the saxon:update and saxon:deep-update instructions in XSLT. Please try them out and give us feedback.

* A new framework for resolving URIs that refer to external resources, integrating catalog-based resolution where appropriate.

* Most callbacks are now provided via functional interfaces, allowing them to be easily written as lambda expressions.

* Timezone handling has moved forward to the modern Java date/time libraries.

* Numerous minor changes to make JSON processing easier

Internally, there's a set of classes for handling Unicode strings. The main motivation for this was to allow common code across Java and C#, but it also improves speed and reduces memory requirements for many string handling operations. The effect is not uniform however; for very simple transformations of documents consisting exclusively of ASCII text, there is generally a memory saving but a small overhead in processing time.

For SaxonCS (.NET 5 and 6 on Windows, Mac, and Linux), this is essentially a bug-fixing release for 11.0. The most important issues fixed relate to localisation (in particular, running on machines whose default Culture setting is not English). For a full list of fixed bugs, please go to https://saxonica.plan.io/projects/saxon/issues and filter the list of bugs for those labelled as "fixed in maintenance release 11.1". In addition to bug fixes, there are some functional changes:

  * As with SaxonJ, there is a new framework for resolving URIs, based on the C# version of the catalog-based xml resolver. The use of the System.Xml.XmlResolver interface has been largely discontinued, except where needed for interoperation with the Microsoft parser, because of its inflexibility in handling different kinds of resources.

  * A few new API methods are implemented to plug gaps, in response to user feedback

  * XQuery Update is fully supported (in 11.0 the code was present but largely untested).

SaxonCS on Mac is still awaiting notarization from Apple; until that's achieved there may be security warnings when you download it.

For SaxonC (C++, Python, and PHP, on Windows, Mac, and Linux) this is the first release since 2019.

* The Java code base has moved forward from 9.9 to 11.1, and the build process is now integrated with SaxonJ and SaxonCS so that bug fixes can be applied simultaneously to all three products.

* There are improvements in multi-threading, when multiple transformations using the same stylesheet are executed in parallel in a web server

* Memory management of XDM objects is improved

* Localization (using ICU-J) is improved

* Handling of Unicode strings in the various language APIs is improved, reducing the scope for encoding issues.

* There are many API extensions and improvements for all three languages (C++, Python, and PHP)

Michael Kay
Saxonica