Scott Boag announced
a
first release of the TRaX and XML Serializer APIs.
Presented as "a good start on a vendor neutral API
that all implementers can eventually agree upon",
these two
APIs define how a XSLT transformation can be called and
controlled (TraX) and the SAX based API used to pipe the
result
into a Java method.
Extending the scope of these APIs, Boag states that:
"While this interface is modeled on the
XSLT process, it should be
generic enough to use with many types of
transformations besides XSLT.
TRaX uses and is dependent on SAX2. TRaX
is a Java API right now, but it
would be great to get a C++, COM, and Perl
version as well."
Although there is no explicit list of vendors or
developers supporting the initiative, Boag expresses
"many many
thanks to Mike Kay, Oracle, Sun, Assaf Arkin and Keith
Visco" and we can assume that the new APIs should be
supported at least by Xalan, Saxon and Oracle.
The new site,
temporarily hosted by Exolab, is hosting a CVS server
and a mailing list - "Medium volume (possibly more
than 5 messages a day) mailing list dedicated to the
developers of
TraX" - has been created.
The XML community is invited to join this effort:
"I sincerely hope that the XML community
will join in on this work, so that we can create the best
possible API. You
don't have to be an implementor, but you
probably want to have good familiarity with XML, and have
used some of the XSLT processor APIs out
there."