November 2009 Report
Xerces-J
A Xerces-J 2.10.0 release should be coming very soon, tentatively planned for December 18th, 2009. It would include among other things a preview of the XML Schema 1.1 support which has been under development. The team continues to make good progress on this front, lately expanding support for CTA to include all of XPath 2.0, making improvements for assertions to better handle namespaces in the XPath expressions and agreeing on a more efficient design for using the PsychoPath XPath 2.0 processor. Other features expected to be in the release are JAXP 1.4, StAX event API (javax.xml.stream.events), Element Traversal API (org.w3c.dom.ElementTraversal) and Unicode normalization checking.
Xerces-C
A large number of bugs have been fixed in the past couple of months in preparation for the 3.1.0 release. On November 5th, 2009 a vote to release the first release candidate for 3.1.0 has passed. The release candidate is tentatively scheduled for November 16th, 2009.
Xerces-P
Nothing in particular to report. There was no development activity over the reporting period.
XML Commons
There has been some recent activity in XML Commons External, with a few bug fixes to StreamResult applied to all of the branches. A release of the JAXP 1.4 APIs is expected before the end of the year to support the upcoming Xerces-J 2.10.0 release.
General
The XML project wondered if Xerces would be interested in taking Crimson for a sub-project. We passed on that. Given its years of inactivity, Crimson is more likely suitable for the Attic.