XML News from Friday, November 24, 2006

The Apache XML Project has released XML Commons External 1.3.04 of.

xml-commons provides an Apache-hosted set of DOM, SAX, and JAXP interfaces for use in other xml-based projects. Our hope is that we can standardize on both a common version and packaging scheme for these critical XML standards interfaces to make the lives of both our developers and users easier.

The External Components portion of xml-commons contains interfaces that are defined by external standards organizations. For DOM, that's the W3c; for SAX it's David Megginson and sax.sourceforge.net; for JAXP it's Sun. While we could send users to each of the primary sources for these deliverables, keeping our own versions of these in the xml-commons repository gives us a number of advantages:

This release supports the Simple API for CSS (SAC) 1.3. It also adds a SchemaFactoryLoader class. "This class was removed from the JAXP 1.3 specification before it was finalized but was mistakenly included in Java 5. It only exists here (and in JAXP 1.4) for compatibility reasons. Applications should avoid using it." Various bugs are fixed as well.