XML News from Thursday, November 24, 2005

Michael Kay has released version 8.6.1 of Saxon, his XSLT 2.0 and XQuery processor. This release adds a new saxon:deep-equal() extension function that "is similar to fn:deep-equal() but with an extra parameter to control the precise details of how the comparison is done. This was found useful as a means of comparing test results for the XQTS test suite with the published results." Assorted bugs are fixed as well. Saxon is published in two versions for both of which Java 1.4 or later is required. Saxon 8.6B is an open source product published under the Mozilla Public License 1.0 that "implements the 'basic' conformance level for XSLT 2.0 and XQuery." Saxon 8.6SA is a £250.00 payware version that "allows stylesheets and queries to import an XML Schema, to validate input and output trees against a schema, and to select elements and attributes based on their schema-defined type. Saxon-SA also incorporates a free-standard XML Schema validator. In addition Saxon-SA incorporates some advanced extensions not available in the Saxon-B product. These include a try/catch capability for catching dynamic errors, improved error diagnostics, support for higher-order functions, and additional facilities in XQuery including support for grouping, advanced regular expression analysis, and formatting of dates and numbers."