Decisionsoft have released their Pathan XPath parsing and evaluation library under a BSD-style license. Precompiled (Linux, Solaris, and Windows) libraries, development RPMs, and source distributions are available from the Pathan download site.

Pathan, which is apparently used as the node-selection component in Decisionsoft's (non-open source) X-Tract implementation of their XML Script transformation language (an XSLT alternative designed to be easier to use for developers more familiar with traditional procedural languages), provides a DOM Level 3 XPath Specification-compliant means for performing arbitrary selection of nodes from a DOM tree.

The Pathan library is designed to be used along with Apache's Xerces-C validating parser, but not as a replacement for the XPath implementation in Apache's Xalan XSLT/XPath implementation.

Developers are encouraged to integrate Pathan into their own applications, to file bug reports (via the Pathan Bugzilla server), and to contribute to the Pathan codebase. The latest Pathan development source, documentation, and build scripts are available via anonymous CVS:

Discussion of Pathan development takes place on the pathan-devel mailing list.