[x3d-public] fwd: [ANN] Saxon 11.1 released for XSLT support; Michael Kay interview

Wed Feb 2 03:23:46 PST 2022

Here is a tremendous interview with Michael Kay regarding Saxon (which we use extensively) and also development of software projects along with standards.  Michael has led W3C XSLT working groups and language development for many years.  Both his software documentation and his books are amazingly thorough (produced using XML/XSLT).

Many great insights, worth repeated viewing.

  *   Shift-M/51: Michael Kay about XSLT, XML, and software business - YouTube
  *   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Zt9oJtFKGw&t=6s

Yegor Bugayenko / Егор Бугаенко
14.9K subscribers

Michael Kay is the editor of the W3C XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 language specifications for performing XML transformations and the developer of the Saxon XSLT and XQuery processing software.

0:00 Introduction
0:40 Is XML old?
3:32 Story of XML
11:22 Versions of Saxon XSLT
14:28 Michael's activity on Stack Overflow
20:42 Understanding of XSLT
24:43 XSLT simplification
27:16 How The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) works
42:26 Compiling XSLT to binary code
59:43 Michael's favorite language

My blog: https://www.yegor256.com
My books: https://www.yegor256.com/books.html
My GitHub: https://github.com/yegor256 (don't hesitate to follow in order to stay informed)
My Telegram channel with recent news and updates: https://t.me/yegor256news (subscribe to not miss a thing)
My Twitter with daily and weekly updates: https://twitter.com/yegor256 (follow me!)

#xslt #interview #xml #programming

Transcript:

  *   https://www.yegor256.com/shift-m/2022/51.html

all the best, Don
--
Don Brutzman  Naval Postgraduate School, Code USW/Br        brutzman at nps.edu
Watkins 270,  MOVES Institute, Monterey CA 93943-5000 USA    +1.831.656.2149
X3D graphics, virtual worlds, Navy robotics https:// faculty.nps.edu/brutzman

From: Brutzman, Donald (Don) (CIV)
Sent: Wednesday, February 2, 2022 2:40 AM
To: X3D Public Mailing List (x3d-public at web3d.org) <x3d-public at web3d.org>
Cc: brutzman at nps.edu
Subject: fwd: [ANN] Saxon 11.1 released for XSLT support (Java C# C++ Python PHP JSON)

http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/202202/msg00000.html

[ANN] Saxon 11.1

  *   From: Michael Kay mike at saxonica.com<mailto:mike at saxonica.com>
  *   To: xml-dev xml-dev at lists.xml.org<mailto:xml-dev at lists.xml.org>
  *   Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2022 09:52:17 +0000

________________________________

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<http://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

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