Re: [ANN] Saxon 10.0 (today's other news..)

Thanks Mike for all your good work over the years. When I'm in the 
middle of complex problems, I find that I can depend on Saxon to do the 
right things. I know that's not easy to accomplish, and I appreciate it 
greatly.

Based on this I'd like to request a coronavirus extension...

Mark Giffin

On 3/16/2020 12:22 PM, Michael Kay mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Saxon 10.0 is released today for the Java platform: 
> http://www.saxonica.com/download/java.xml
>
> 10.0 feels like a special number, and marks something of a milestone, 
> although to be honest it's only called 10.0 because it happens to be 
> the 31st major release since 7.0 came out back in 2002. Think of it as 
> the culmination of 18 years' work, think of it as the dawn of a new 
> era, or just think of it as Saxonica carrying on doing what we're good at.
>
> As always there's a minutely detailed list of changes in the 
> documentation on the web site, but to save you time, here are the "top 
> ten" highlights that we think
> will be most popular:
>
> * Higher order functions and xsl:evaluate are now available in Saxon-HE.
>
> * An interactive command-line utility named Gizmo is available for 
> ad-hoc querying and updating of documents.
>
> * A new API is provided for easy and efficient tree construction, 
> based on modern API design ideas using fluent and immutable objects.
> These complement the stream-based API introduced in 9.9 for tree 
> navigation.
>
> * XSLT and XPath provide an optional switch to allow unprefixed names 
> to ignore namespaces, so the path /a/b/c matches elements with
> local names "a", "b", and "c" regardless of namespace. Ideal for 
> ad-hoc queries where namespaces just get in the way, as well as 
> queries on
> single-namespace documents.
>
> * HTML serialization now generates HTML5 by default (support for 
> html-version="4" is retained if explicitly requested).
>
> * Saxon now integrates with the new date-and-time handling features in 
> Java 8, including a new extension function saxon:parse-dateTime()
> that builds on Java date parsing capabilities.
>
> * Many new extension functions are available, most of them taking 
> advantage of the power of higher-order functions. For example,
>   saxon:replace-with("Chapter 13", "[0-9]+", 
> function($x){number($x)+1}) returns "Chapter 14".
>
> * Saxon 10.0 includes experimental implementations of a number of 
> powerful new XSLT and XPath features, which Saxonica
> has put forward for inclusion in a new version 4.0 of the standards. 
> These include tuple types, named item types, streamlined syntax
> for inline functions and conditional instructions, XSLT instructions 
> to handle arrays, and enhancements to XSLT patterns to make
> JSON transformation much easier. These features are only available if 
> explicitly enabled.
>
> * A number of extensions to XML Schema 1.1 are provided: list data 
> types can be constrained to be distinct and/or ordered, and can
> use a separator other than whitespace; elements in a sequence can also 
> be constrained to appear in ascending or descending order.
>
> * As always, there has been significant internal re-engineering to 
> keep the code performant and maintainable. A significant change is
> in the way namespaces are represented both in the tree model (the 
> NodeInfo interface) and in the push pipeline (the Receiver interface):
> both now deliver namespace maps representing complete sets of 
> namespace bindings, rather than individual namespace declarations
> and undeclarations. The main benefit is that copying of trees with 
> many namespaces is significantly faster.
>
> Saxon 10.0 requires Java 8 or higher. A .NET version will follow 
> later. Saxon 10.0 can export compiled stylesheets in the form of SEF files
> suitable for reading either by Saxon 10.0, or by Saxon-JS 2 (which 
> will be released in the next few weeks); SEF files cannot be used with 
> earlier releases.
>
> In future we intend to use two-part version numbers rather than 
> four-part: the next major release will be 11.0, the next maintenance 
> release 10.1.
>
> The number of tests we run increases every time we release; it's now 
> close to a million. But we know from experience that some of you will 
> still find bugs.
> We're therefore recommending production users to stick with 9.9 (which 
> has become very stable and reliable) for the time being, while testing 
> your applications
> on 10.0 and reporting any issues you encounter.
>
> Michael Kay
> Saxonica
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