Hi Joseph, There is no way to know really how much a project is used, we can only get very coarse grained stats from places like Maven Central for Java artifacts. It's just the nature of this type of software distribution.
>From a user perspective, Saxon is light years ahead of Xalan-J. I did the last Xalan-J release and it was a pain. No one is around to remember what is in what branch. The tooling is outdated as is the Java version minimally required. XSL specifications are up to 3.0 and Xalan-J is still on 1.0 so there would be a huge amount of work to do to move the project forward. Another issue is that I do not think we know what Oracle has done since it copied Xalan inside the JRE codebase. Gary On Wed, Feb 2, 2022, 12:07 Joseph Kesselman <[email protected]> wrote: > Or has everyone moved to other tools? > > As [email protected], I was involved in Xalan's development. (And > Xerxes, to a _much_ lesser extent; I wrote their first DOM implementation.) > > I retired last year, which means I have some hours available. I have a > personal project under way right now, but after I get version 1.0 of that > published I could be persuaded to re-familiarize myself with the Xalan-J > code and do some cleanup and improvement on it. Some of the ideas we were > playing with internally were patented, but (a) I think IBM would grant > approval to Apache if we ask nicely, and (b) I think the one I'd want to > use first may have elapsed by now in any case. > > Note that I'm not volunteering to tackle the current implementation of > Xalan-C. That was based on Xalan 1.0, which is a somewhat different > architecture, I wasn't involved in the translation, and C++ is not my > strong suit; I was able to keep Xalan-C limping along for a while, but I > would recommend rewriting it completely, preferably _after_ at least some > of the work on Xalan-J has been done. (A shift to a cursor-based data model > API in particular.) Also, I suspect that Xalan-C's code is horribly archaic > at this point; C++ was still trying to find it's feet at the time it was > written. > > Anyway, there it is: if there's significant demand, I can try to make > myself available; if there isn't, I'd rather put my effort into something > that would be more valuable to the community. > > - > Sent from palmtop; apologies for any auto-incorrections. > () | Text Mail Campaign > /\ | Stamp out HTML mail >
