Release 9.2 is the latest milestone in Saxonica's implementation of the XPath 2.0, XSLT 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 specifications.
This is the first functionality release in a year, and there are many new features and performance improvements. A full list is available and there is also a summary of the highlights.
A significant change in this release is repackaging of the functionality: instead of the two products Saxon-B (open source) and Saxon-SA (commercial), there are now three editions: home, professional, and enterprise (HE, PE, and EE). The Home Edition remains open source, under the same very liberal licensing rules, but some of the more advanced features that were present in Saxon-B have not been retained in Saxon-HE, and are instead available only in the commercial packages Saxon-PE and Saxon-EE. Saxon-B users whose applications depend on these features have a number of options available: upgrading to the professional or enterprise editions, modifying the application so it no longer depends on these features, implementing equivalent functionality as a home-grown extension to Saxon-HE, or, of course, staying with Saxon-B 9.1, which will remain available on the SourceForge site indefinitely.
Most of the new functionality in this release is available only in the commercial offerings.
The specifications listed above are now official W3C Recommendations. Saxon is fully conformant with the final version of the specs, providing all the mandatory features of those specifications and nearly all the optional features. In most cases Saxon 9.2 implements the changes documented in the latest errata to these specifications, or equivalently, the proposed second editions of the specifications published on 21 April 2009. For further details on conformance, see the conformance page.
Saxon continues its tradition of implementing new W3C drafts as soon as they become available. This release extends its support for XQuery Updates 1.0 and XML Schema 1.1, and introduces support for selected features from the XQuery 1.1 working draft. It also provides early implementation (in the form of vendor extensions) for some of the new facilities for streaming currently being discussed in the XSL Working Group, which are not yet published.
Like previous releases, this version is shipped simultaneously for the Java and .NET platforms.
This documentation covers all versions of the product, with differences noted where applicable. For a summary of the differences, see Product Packages.
saxon-resources9-n.zip, and is separate
from the software download. It includes documentation for both Saxon-B and Saxon-EE,
on both platforms. The file also includes sample applications and Saxon-B source code.
JavaDoc API specifications and .NET API specifications are also available.
A full change log is provided.
If you are looking for an XSLT 1.0 or XPath 1.0 processor, Saxon 6.5.5 remains available. However, Saxon 9.2 is capable of executing XSLT 1.0 stylesheets with identical results in the vast majority of cases, often with much better performance, so you may prefer to use the latest release.