Hello Joseph, hi everyone,
unfortunately, I have only seen this thread now, but I would still like to add my two cents: First: Thank you all for all the time and effort that has gone into developing Xalan! And yes, Xalan-J is definitely still widely and actively used by many thousands of projects and people, despite its age and limitation to XSLT 1. It still forms, comparable perhaps to Log4j, an extremely important cornerstone of the entire Java ecosystem. The only possible alternatives - Saxon and the Xalan copy inside the JDK - are not an adequate replacement in many cases. Saxon is not usable for many projects due to its licensing policy, the status of the Xalan copy in the JDK is relatively unclear. It is obviously not actively developed and still suffers from bugs reported many years ago. It would be absolutely great if the Xalan-J project continued. Upgrading it to XSLT 3 would be really awesome! Unfortunately, however, I can only offer very limited help with further development. Xalan-J is used excessively in my company and by our customers, but we all lack the technical background knowledge for a substantial contribution to further development. Cheers, momo On 2022/02/02 17:07:37 Joseph Kesselman 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.
