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Subject: XOM API for Processing XML with Java

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  • From: Michael Kay <mike AT saxonica.com>
  • To: xom-interest AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [XOM-interest] XOM, Maven and dependencies
  • Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2010 22:36:46 +0100

I'm probably especially sensitive to XML parser bugs because people often report them as Saxon bugs: people get a bad impression of my product and I waste a lot of time on support. There's nothing I can do to work around these bugs, so I tell people not to use this parser. The worst one is that the JDK fork of Xerces occasionally reports completely spurious attribute values for a completely normal well-formed document. I don't have a complete catalog of such bugs, I gave up reporting them years ago because Sun showed no interest in fixing them.

Of course the Apache guys suffer even more from this, see for example

http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.text.xml.xerces-j.user/month=20100901

http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/oWz7DO5qVsREFzaO2ZbC

http://old.nabble.com/JDK-XERCES-DOM-PARSER-WASTES-CPU-ON-NON-PARSING-TASKS-td17865215.html

It's one of the hazards of open source software that someone will tarnish your reputation by producing a fork that is inferior to the original, without renaming the product to make the distinction clear.

Michael Kay
Saxonica

On 29/09/2010 6:54 PM, Dmitry Katsubo wrote:
Dear Michael,

Bugs are everywhere :) One needs to find a balance between a provided
functionality and level of bugs.

Xalan has also released 2.7.1 (I hope with a big set of bug fixes), so
one blindly using XOM 1.1 with its dependencies may feel the difference.
Whatever version you specify, there will be another with bugfixes :) And
one anyway has to specify explicitly the parser/transformer (and it may
be not Xerces/Xalan at all).

Just for my information: could you please name few bugs in JDK6 Xerces,
which are severe? For me not to step on rakes.

On 29.09.2010 12:36, Michael Kay wrote:
This seems to ignore the fact that the versions of Xalan and Xerces
included in the Sun JDK 1.5 and 1.6 distributions have serious bugs,
which no-one seems to be interested in fixing, and no-one should be
using these versions in preference to the Apache distributions.

Michael Kay
Saxonica





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