Re: [xsl] Are there any free, fully-compliant XSLT/XPath 3.0 processors?

Subject: Re: [xsl] Are there any free, fully-compliant XSLT/XPath 3.0 processors?
From: Liam R E Quin <liam@xxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2013 16:38:35 -0500
On Sat, 2013-01-26 at 20:58 +0000, Costello, Roger L. wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> I only know of one fully-compliant XSLT/XPath 3.0 processor -- SAXON.

Actually since XPath 3.0 is not yet a W3C Recommendation, and XSLT 3 is
stilla Working Draft, it would be premature for anyone to claim
conformance.

> And it's not free.
Saxon Home Edition is zero-dollar. Or do you mean free as in libre/GPL?

> Here's why: The people I work with think along these lines:
>      XSLT and XPath are nice but not
>      essential. If I have to pay for an 
>      XSLT/XPath processor, then I certainly 
>      will not use XSLT or XPath. Why
>      should I? I can use Java and it's free.

Productivity tools are often a hard sell.

If you see XPath as a domain-specific language for pointing into XML
documents, or into XDM trees, it's hard to see a lot of people wanting
to pay for something if all it did was save them money, improve
reliability, reduce costs and speed up development. Unless they had an
ounce or more of business sense that is :-)

> So, if there is no free, fully-compliant XSLT/XPath 3.0 processor, I
> doubt that XSLT/XPath 3.0 will get any uptake by the people I work
> with.

For XPath 3.1 I really hope we can define a minimal conformance level
that's close to XPath 1, so that we might actually get more
implementations. It's probably too late for XPath 3, but I admit I think
it's insane for us to require programmers to implement closures in XPath
for e.g. XPointer schemes.

There _are_ some zero-dollar XPath 2 implementations floating around,
e.g. there's one that's used in Eclipse, although I don't know how
complete it is. There's actually slightly more on the XQuery side, with
e.g. PHP APIs for both BaseX and Zorba, which may help get XQuery and
XPath into Web servers.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

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