XML News from Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Advanced Software Production Line has released libaxl 0.3, a C parser for XML. However it doesn't seem to be namespace aware, which makes it of very limited use in modern environments. Also, the API misspells "annotate".


XimpleWare has released VTD-XML 1.9, a free (GPL) non-extractive Java/C/C# library for processing XML that supports XPath. This appears to be an example of what Sam Wilmot calls "in situ parsing". In other words, rather than creating objects representing the content of an XML document, VTD-XML just passes pointers into the actual, real XML. (These are the abstract pointers of your data structures textbook, not C-style addresses in memory. In this cases the pointers are int indexes into the file.) You don't even need to hold the document in memory. It can remain on disk. This should improve speed and memory usage, but I haven't verified that. Version 1.9 is a bug fix release.


Opera Software has released version 9.10 of their namesake free-beer web browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. Opera supports XML, CSS, and XSLT. 9.10 adds phishing protection.


Syntext has released Serna 3.1. a $268 payware XSL-based WYSIWYG XML Document Editor for Mac OS X, Windows, and Unix. Features include on-the-fly XSL-driven XML rendering and transformation, on-the-fly XML Schema validation, XInclude, and spell checking. Version 3.1 adds several localizations including Chinese, Dutch, French, German, and Italian. It also fixes bugs.