Java News from Tuesday, March 10, 2009

I am pleased to announce the release of XOM 1.2.1, my free-as-in-speech (LGPL) dual streaming/tree-based API for processing XML with Java. Version 1.2.x adds several minor new features including:

• Latest Unicode normalization tables.
• A lookup method in XPathContext that finds the namespace URI for a prefix
• xml:id attributes no longer checked for NCNames
• Upgraded to Xerces 2.8.0, DTD-only version
• DOMConverter can accept a NodeFactory to be used in creating the XOM document
• Various bugs were fixed, especially in canonicalization and XPath, and one that could cause toXML to generate malformed output when a namespace URI contained an ampersand.

1.2.1 fixes one very minor glitch in 1.2.0. (The version number was still printing 1.0 on System.out.) XOM 1.2.1 should be fully backwards compatible with code written to 1.0 and 1.1 APIs. 1.2.1 should also be somewhat easier to compile and edit due to various changes with UnicodeUtil and Jaxen.

My apologies that this one took so long. There should have been a release in 2007, but late 2007-2008 was a very challenging time. (Moved across the country; new jobs, etc.) On the plus side, several additional bugs did get fixed over the last year.

At this point XOM is essentially feature-complete. I have no plans for major additions to the API though I will continue to fix any bugs that are discovered and improve performance as opportunities suggest themselves.