Re: ANN: Maintenance 4xt

Subject: Re: ANN: Maintenance 4xt
From: James Clark <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 02 Jun 2000 19:15:56 +0700
Eric van der Vlist wrote:

> we must (IMHO) try to keep XT (under this name or any other one)
> alive

Why?

My main goal in writing XT was to support the development of the XSLT
spec, both to help me understand the language better and so do a better
job as editor and to allow others to experiment with the language as it
evolved and thus contribute timely feedback to the development of the
language.  With the publication of the Rec, this goal has been achieved,
and consequently I haven't done significant work on it since then.

There are plenty of other XSLT processors out there. I can't say I have
looked at any of them in detail, but by all accounts at least some of
them are pretty decent. Might it not be better to let XT quietly fade
away in favour of other XSLT processors whose authors have an interest
in continuing to maintain them?  The only thing that seems to
differentiate XT is performance and I don't know to what extent that is
still the case with the latest version of Saxon.  It shouldn't be too
hard to make an XSLT processor that is faster than XT; I haven't spent
much time optimizing it (and I know of plenty of things that could be
done to make it a bit faster). If other XSLT processors are still
lagging in performance, perhaps it's possible to apply experience from
XT in improving their performance. If there's any interest from other
implementors, maybe I can find time to write up a description of the
basic techniques used in XT (many of which were inherited from Jade).

There just doesn't seem a lot of point in continuing to maintain lots of
very similar, independent XSLT implementations in Java.

James


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