XML News from Thursday, January 11, 2007

Per Bothner has released Qexo 1.8.95, an XQuery to Java byte code compiler. According to Bothner, "This is basically a release candidate for Qexo 1.9. At this point, I'm concentrating on on updating documentation and the web site, rather than adding features, fixing bugs, or tuning, though if a bug is reported in time it might get fixed!" Qexo is published under the X11/MIT license.


The W3C Voice Browser Working Group has posted the first public working draft of the Speech Synthesis Markup Language Version 1.1. According to the abstract, the Speech Synthesis Markup Language "is designed to provide a rich, XML-based markup language for assisting the generation of synthetic speech in Web and other applications. The essential role of the markup language is to provide authors of synthesizable content a standard way to control aspects of speech such as pronunciation, volume, pitch, rate, etc. across different synthesis-capable platforms." New elements in this release lang, and w (for word).


ITRIS has released Glips Graffiti 1.5, an SVG editor based on Batik. "It features shape tools (rectangles, circles, ellipses, lines, polygons, and polylines), path tools (Bezier curves, conversion to a path, union, subtraction, and intersection), basic text support, and image import (SVG or Bitmap). Supported transformations are translate, resize, rotate, and skew. A property manager is available for each object, and a resource manager takes care of gradients, patterns, markers, and filters." Java 6 or later is required.

Glips Graffiti is published under the GPL which is a problem since it's based on Batik, which has a GPL-incompatible license. This needs to be cleared up before it can be reliably adopted.