March 2008 Report

Xerces-J

Aside from some prototyping on an implementation of XML Schema 1.1 the project has been fairly quiet. Design thoughts have been posted on the Wiki. A few JIRA issues were recently raised by a member regarding the website/documentation (e.g. links to MD5 files) and packages we've published. We plan to address these before having our next release.

Xerces-C

A number of big tasks have been completed in the preparation for the 3.0.0 release:

  • Website copy split and documentation reorganization in order to host both 3 and 2-series releases.
  • Reorganization of the autotools-based build system.
  • Removal of the lazy initialization that relied on invalid double-checked locking trick.
  • Clean up of the error messages.

The build and tests are now passing on a number of platforms that were known to fail before (AIX, Solaris, Cygwin/Mingw). See the XercescBuildStatus page for details. A successful vote for the release of 3.0.0 beta was held.

Xerces-P

Giaugo Rabellino kindly pointed out (with thanks to Black Duck Software) that some files still have the 1.1 Apache license. No release has been made with the incorrect license version. When Xerces-C 3.0 is released the new version of P will be with the 2.0 license. This has been corrected in SVN.

XML Commons

Though there was no new development there was one bug report (http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=44426) opened that is worth noting. The W3C receives a large number of requests every day for the same DTDs, XML Schemas and other XML resources. They've observed that this happens in large part because applications are not using XML Catalogs or grammar caching facilities such as the ones provided by Xerces. They're appealing to us for help. We plan to review their thoughts/proposals.

GHOP

We recently participated in the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest and engaged with a couple of students on some small tasks including a new logo for the project (designed by Ashley Morgan).

Cryptography

We are not aware of any cryptographic code in the Apache Xerces distributions.

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