Hi Mukul,
Xalan-J's XSL 3 implementation has not been integrated into any Xalan
releases. I understand it implemented most of the XSLT 3.0
specification, but not all of them, esp. the Streaming feature. Was the
incompleteness the reason why it was not included in an Xalan release?
What's your assessment on the readiness for a formal release (or how
much additional work is needed)? What are the conformance test results?
Also, do you have data showing how the Xalan-J's XSL 3 implementation is
used in user applications? What are the feedback (or bug reports) from
developers?
Thanks,
Joe
On 2/26/25 7:59 AM, Mukul Gandhi wrote:
Hi Alan,
I've just seen this mail from you. Apologies for a delayed response.
My mail box has had few issues due to the volume of mails that I get
from mailing lists.
On Sun, Feb 2, 2025 at 9:38 PM Alan Bateman <alan.bate...@oracle.com> wrote:
The stats for that branch suggest 5,845 changed files with 234,372 additions
and 84,058 deletions. I can't easily tell how much of this would need to come
into the jdk repo but this looks like a major update. If only 10% of this is
applicable to the JDK then it still needs seems like a major update that would
require a huge investment to audit and integrate this code. How much XML is in
new applications developed in 2025? Only asking because it's an area that is
surely much lower priority compared to all the other major investments right
now. Maybe there are useful security or performance changes that would be
useful to cherry pick instead? Finally, does this Xalan update work with the
SPIs so that someone really looking for XSL 3 can just deploy it on the class
path and module path?
Ofcourse, anyone could use Xalan-J's XSL 3 implementation with JDK by
placing Xalan jars on class path & module path.
Since Xalan-J's XSLT 1.0 & XPath 1.0 implementations are already
available within JDK, I thought its natural if JDK could pick
Xalan-J's XSL 3 implementation and include that within JDK. I can
imagine that this may surely be time consuming for someone from JDK
team to integrate with JDK. XSLT 1.0's use I think is very less these
days particularly for new XML projects, due to vast improvements in
language features offered by XSLT 3.0 and XPath 3.1.
IMHO, I wrote all the XSL 3 implementation code (and solved various
XSL 3 implementation bugs reported by community on Xalan-J's dev
forum) within Xalan-J's XSL 3 dev respos branch, enhancing upon
Xalan-J's XSLT 1.0 implementation. From my point of view, I'll be
happy if JDK could include Xalan-J's XSL 3 implementation.
I even wrote following two online articles on xml.com about few of XSL
3 language features, and how they're implemented within Xalan-J,
https://www.xml.com/articles/2024/07/22/string-analysis-with-analyze-string/
https://www.xml.com/articles/2023/12/05/xml-path-language-xpath-higher-order-functions/
Many thanks.
