Saxon-JS 2 is here!

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

This is one of Saxon/C sister project which is significant to the Node.js community and a big development for 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 -- 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