Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart's Blog

April 2005 Archives

Revamped JWSDP Developer home page

I have revamped the JWSDP developer's home page at Java.Net. There has been a lot of new activity in the JWSDP community including new EAs for JAX-RPC 2.0 and JAXB 2.0; the SJSXP and JAXP 1.3 weekly builds, and I piling that on the old page seemed to make things more messy, so I used that excuse for the cleanup.

The new page tries to provide a quick entry into News, Downloads, Specs, Blogs, Mailing Lists and Forums. The home page will also highlight developers and projects as those are the core of the JWSDP community.

As with all sites, this is work in progress; post your feedback as comments on this blog, or mail them directly to me.

JAXB 2.0 and JAX-RPC 2.0 EA binaries...

Doug reports that the binaries for the EA for JAX-RPC 2.0 are out. I'm sure Kohsuke or Sekhar will have a corresponding blog on JAXB 2.0. The downloads are off the correspoding Java.Net projects: jax-rpc and jaxb.

Please give us feedback!.

JAX-RPC 2.0 ED 3 is out!

Marc and Roberto and the rest of the JAX-RPC 2.0 Expert Group have released the Early Draft 3 for JAX-RPC 2.0. Binaries and sources are not yet posted to the jax-rpc project. Give us your feedback!.

Help produce great JAXB/JAX-RPC 2.0 Specs

I believe that the main reason why Java has been and continues to be a great platform is its community. Here is another challenge to this community: we need your help to refine JAXB 2.0 and JAX-RPC 2.0 so they will meet the needs of your fellow Java developers. In the next few days we are going to release this Early Access implementation to Java.Net, and we hope that will encourage exploration of the spec and feedback.

The Expert Groups now have fairly complete early drafts, and the implementation is tracking those drafts. The latest JAXB 2.0 is Early Draft Review 2, from March 23rd. The latest published JAX-RPC 2.0 is Early Draft Review 2, but the version to read is an ED3 that is in the JCP publishing queue and that should be out in a couple of days.

An up-to-date implementation makes it much easier to explore the specification, so we truly hope that the EA will encourage your feedback. As usual, the EGs still have material that it has not been incorporated into the drafts, but don't let that stop you: the Early Drafts are quite complete and, from now on, the EA will be tracking changes in a transparent, continuous manner, so you will be able to track the spec as it reacts to the EG and the community.

The Early Access release will be available at the usual Java.Net projects: JAXB and JAX-RPC. If no last minute problems arise, they will both be out this week, and we will send a further announcement then.

Please provide feedback on the 2.0 specs through the forum that was set up for this. The forum has been pretty active but most of the (very positive) feedback has been on JAXB 2.0 and we specially need additional feedback on the JAX-RPC 2.0 spec. Please provide feedback, the Java developers of years to come will thank you.

JAXP 1.3 sources now at Java.Net!

JAXP is the core API for XML processing in the Java platform. The latest version is JAXP 1.3 which is in bundled in Tiger and is also available unbundled for older JVMs. Those implementations were frozen sometime before the final round of integrations into Tiger and were overdue for an update with the latest changes Xerces and Xalan. The JAXP team just finished that integration; the sources are available at Java.Net right now and will be donated to Apache very soon (tomorrow?).

The integration milestone seems a good excuse to do a quick review of the JAXP 1.3 features. Neeraj has written a nice article, but below is a very brief summary for those in a hurry...

The biggest addition in JAXP 1.3 is the new Schema validation framework. In the older APIs, validation was a feature of the XML parser used: you requested a validating or non-validating parser (be it SAX or DOM) and there you went. The new Validation API decouples the validation of an instance document from the parsing of the document. This new approach has a number of advantages including reuse of compiled Schemas, support for other schema languages (Relax NG fans will like that), the ability to validate without parsing, like after a transformation or in memory, and others. I always found the old mechanism a bit awkward, so I was very happy to see the new API.

Another substantial addition is a new API for XPath. The API currently supports XPath 1.0 but it was designed with the intention of extending it to XPath 2.0 in a future version of JAXP. The API allows reevaluating expressions in different contexts, support for namespaces, support for variables in XPath expressions, and others.

JAXP 1.3 also includes some additional XML Schema Datatypes, support for XInclude, a new reset() method to reuse a parser instance, and a new property to alleviate denial of service attacks

Have fun! If you want to use the features right away, download Tiger or the unbundled implementation at Java.Net. The unbundled version is based on the same sources as the version in Tiger so it is very stable; I expect builds based on the latest updates from Xerces and Xalan to follow pretty soon.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.