Saxonica: Our products

Our products

The Saxon product implements:

  • Four W3C-defined languages for processing XML (all up to date with the latest specifications):
    • XSLT 3.0 for transformations
    • XQuery 3.1 for queries
    • XSD 1.1 for document validation
    • XPath 3.1 for navigation within documents
  • In three editions, each offering different levels of functionality:
    • Home Edition (HE) - open source, free of charge
    • Professional Edition (PE) - with extra features for serious users
    • Enterprise Edition (EE) - with optimizations for high throughput and productivity
  • On four technology platforms:
    • SaxonJ for Java, with language bindings to other JVM-based languages such as Scala
    • SaxonCS for .NET, with language bindings to .NET-based languages such as C# and Visual Basic
    • SaxonC for Native, with language bindings to C, C++, PHP, and Python
    • SaxonJS for JavaScript, running in all modern browsers and on Node.js

Product features

The main features offered by each of the Saxon products are outlined below (as in the most recent release, Saxon 12). See the Feature matrix for full details and to compare the different products, and Saxon architecture for a diagrammatic overview of Saxon's main components and dataflows. Note that for Saxon 11 and 12, the .NET product SaxonCS is currently available only in the Enterprise Edition.

Saxon-HE

Home Edition: open-source entry-level product (available from GitHub, Maven, and Nuget). Provides implementations of XSLT 3.0, XQuery 3.1, and XPath 3.1 at the basic level of conformance defined by W3C.
View full description for: SaxonJ-HE 12, SaxonC-HE 12

Saxon-PE

Professional Edition: adds a number of features to Saxon-HE, including optional features in XSLT 3.0, support for Saxon extensions, extensibility mechanisms, and optional features in XQuery 3.1; integration with the ICU library to provide localization for different languages; and support for external object models (such as JDOM2, XOM, DOM4J, AXIOM) on Java.
View full description for: SaxonJ-PE 12, SaxonC-PE 12

Saxon-EE

Enterprise Edition: the fully-featured product. Fully conformant XSD 1.0 and XSD 1.1 schema processor, with support for schema-aware XSLT and XQuery processing. Many other features including streaming in XSLT and XQuery, XSLT packages, support for XQuery updates, an advanced query optimizer, compilation of XQuery and XSLT code to Java bytecode, and much more.
View full description for: SaxonJ-EE 12, SaxonCS-EE 12, SaxonC-EE 12

Saxon Enterprise Edition is available in four licensing packages, the difference being the extent to which the processor enables enterprise features (including Schema Awareness) for XSLT and XQuery. Below, "EE" means the enterprise features are included:

EEV

Validation package: Schema validation, XPath (EE); No XSLT and no XQuery enterprise features.
(In the online shop, select the "No XSLT" and "No XQuery" language options.)
View full description for: SaxonJ-EEV 12, SaxonCS-EEV 12, SaxonC-EEV 12

EET

Transformation package: Schema validation, XPath (EE), XSLT (EE); No XQuery enterprise features.
(In the online shop, select the "No XQuery" language option.)
View full description for: SaxonJ-EET 12, SaxonCS-EET 12, SaxonC-EET 12

EEQ

Query package: Schema validation, XPath (EE), XQuery (EE); No XSLT enterprise features.
(In the online shop, select the "No XSLT" language option.)
View full description for: SaxonJ-EEQ 12, SaxonCS-EEQ 12, SaxonC-EEQ 12

EE

Enterprise Edition: The full product. Schema Validation, XPath, XSLT and XQuery, all enterprise features (including Schema Awareness).
View full description for: SaxonJ-EE 12, SaxonCS-EE 12, SaxonC-EE 12

SaxonJS

High-performance XSLT 3.0 and XPath 3.1 processor for JavaScript that runs in the browser or on Node.js. Runs as a JavaScript application in the browser; the processor has extensions for user-interaction, JavaScript interoperability and HTML DOM read/write.

XML technologies

For an introduction to XML, and XML technologies, see Technology.

Technology platforms

The latest versions of Saxon-HE, Saxon-PE and Saxon-EE are available for: Java, and C/C++, PHP and Python. Note that for Saxon 11 and 12, the .NET product SaxonCS is currently available only in the Enterprise Edition. For further details see Platforms.

SaxonJS is the Saxon product for JavaScript.