[xsl] [ANN] Saxon-JS 2.0 is released

["Michael Kay mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A significant announcement today...  Saxon-JS 2 is released!

This is a big development for Saxon on the Javascript platform. The most
obvious changes are:

* The product is now available on Node.js as well as in the browser

* The product now includes an XSLT compiler as well as a run-time, so it is no
longer restricted to users who have purchased a Saxon-EE license.

But there's also a vast number of smaller changes:

* A serializer with a very high level of conformance to the W3C
specifications

* A richer Javascript API both for XSLT transformations and XPath evaluation

* Support for higher-order functions

* General filling in of remaining conformance gaps, taking us to 99.9%
coverage of XSLT 3.0 and XPath 3.1.

* Significant performance enhancements.

We're very excited by the potential of this product. Node.js has become a very
popular platform for high-performance web services, and until now it has had
rather poor support for XML technologies generally, and XSLT in particular.
Saxon-JS on Node.js is effectively a brand new XSLT processor, which can now
operate completely independently of the Java product. Our initial performance
results are very encouraging indeed.

We're making Saxon-JS available at no charge (but it's not open source). We'll
be offering a subscription package for enterprise users that will offer source
code, debugging aids, and functional add-ons in due course (please let us know
if you're interested: that will help us in designing the service). But for the
moment, please download it and try it out. For Node.js, it's on npm with
package names "xslt3" and "saxon-js". For the browser, you can download from
www.saxonica.com/saxon-js <http://www.saxonica.com/saxon-js> -- where you will
also find full documentation, delivered (of course) using Saxon-JS itself.

Debbie Lockett and John Lumley have devoted the last couple of years to this
project, and deserve a big round of applause.

Michael Kay
Saxonica