Alexey Gokhberg has announced the availability of the "Professional Edition" of Unicorn's XSLT processor, a freely available C++-based processor for XSLT 1.0.

The processor is only currently available for Windows platforms.

Unicorn differentiate their processor by stressing its aims to integrate XSLT with other technologies. To this purpose, their processor embeds an ECMAScript interpreter, which can be used for XSLT extension functions and elements along with Unicorn's object-based XSLT extension technology.

The processor also includes a set of database extensions, which allow the use of SQL data sources in XSLT scripts. Initially only OBDC data sources are supported.

Other extensions include formatted-text datasources and extension elements for report generation.

Judging by its feature list, this new processor would appear to be a powerful tool for integrating XSLT into existing business systems. Unicorn claim to implement the entire XSLT 1.0 specification.