The Apache XML project has released an alpha release of Xalan J 2.0, a new release of their XSLT Processor implementing the TRaX interfaces and building on SAX 2 and DOM Level 2.

Paul Dick has announced this alpha release on the Apache XML mailing list as meeting most of the requirements for XSLT processors and a significant improvement over previous releases:

Please keep in mind that it is an alpha release, but it does fulfill most of the W3C requirements for an XSLT processor. It takes advantage of SAX 2 and DOM level 2, and it implements a preliminary version of the TraX (Transformations for XML) interfaces. We believe the design represents a major advance on Xalan-Java 1, and that you will find Xalan-Java 2, with its support for incremental transformations easier to incorporate in your applications.

Xalan J 2.0 is published with a detailed Design documentation presenting the internal architecture of the XSLT processor.

Amongst many design changes, a XPath module has been isolated as one of the four main modules to "emphasize that the intention is that this package can be used independently of the XSLT engine, even though it has dependencies on the Xalan utils module".

Developers implementing over XML database storages may be interested to see that this module has been designed "to enable database connections to be used as drivers directly to the XPath LocationPath handling".

Other stories:

• First step toward a portable XSLT Java API
• XSLT processors benchmarked
• Apache Xalan-J 1.1 XSLT processor released