XML News from Wednesday, April 20, 2005

I've posted the first beta release of XOM 1.1, my free-as-in-speech (LGPL) dual streaming/tree-based API for processing XML with Java. Version 1.1 maintains backwards compatibility with XOM 1.0 while adding a number of important new features including XPath support. The API is now considered to be reasonably stable, and probably won't change before 1.1 final. The primary addition to beta 1 are workarounds for several more Crimson bugs in the handling of the internal DTD subset. Beta 1 also makes a few small optimizations and fixes a few bugs in XPath. Beta 1 requires Java 1.4 or later due to some changes in the underlying Jaxen XPath engine. This is a temporary situation. Beta 2 will return to the previous requirements of Java 1.2 or later.


Henry S. Thompson and Richard Tobin have released XSV 2.9, a partial W3C XML Schema Validator for Linux and Windows. There's also a web form based interface. This is a bug fix release.


The Apache Web Services Project has posted version 0.4 of JaxMe 2, an open source implementation of the Java API for XML Binding. Quoting from the web page,

JaxMe 2 is an open source implementation of JAXB, the specification for Java/XML binding.

A Java/XML binding compiler takes as input a schema description (in most cases an XML schema but it may be a DTD, a RelaxNG schema, a Java class inspected via reflection or a database schema). The output is a set of Java classes:

In the case of JaxMe, the generated classes may also

In other words, by simply creating a schema and running the JaxMe binding compiler, you have automatically generated classes that implement the complete workflow of a typical web application:

Version 0.4 adds support for nested groups and the indexed collection type.


Late Night Software has released version 2.8 of its free-beer, expat based XML Tools AppleScript scripting addition. This is a bug fix release.


Kiyut has released Sketsa 3.1, a $49 payware SVG editor written in Java. Version 3.1 adds various small features including text selection through the mouse. Java 1.4.1 or later is required.