XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Michael Kay <mike AT saxonica.com>]

 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