Re: Are folks still actively using Xalan-J?

On 02.02.22 18:07, Joseph Kesselman wrote:
> Or has everyone moved to other tools?
> 
> As [email protected], I was involved in Xalan's development. (And 
> Xerxes, to a _much_ lesser extent; I wrote their first DOM implementation.)
> 
> [...]
> 

Hi,

just my personal view: Several years ago, we moved away from XSL/T 1.0 
to XSL/T 2.0, as it provided so much more functionality and allowed us 
to simplify our tasks. We are currently using the open source Saxon 
"Home Edition" as the processor. It is limited in its functionality, 
however, while the limitations do exist, they do not prevent anyone from 
taking advantage of the important features of XSLT/2+. So this is more 
than fair and the said shall not be regarded as any kind of negative 
critics on Michael Kay's business model. Nevertheless, to my knowledge, 
there is no open source Java implementation available that fully 
implements XSL/T 2.0 and later versions.

On the other hand, one has to admit that XML and the related 
technologies are no longer everyone's darling. XML and the related 
technologies are nowadays regarded as verbose, cumbersome and no longer 
as modern or state-of-the-art. The next generation of developers 
probably might see these as dinosaurs like my generation saw the 
mainframes and COBOL. They are more and more replaced by other 
technologies (which are IMHO in no way better). For example, in a 
recently project, I could not convince my younger colleagues to use 
XSL/T for a specific task as we did in previous projects – a much 
simpler, but also much less powerful approach was chosen.

That said, I believe there is surely a community that would appreciate 
your work, but that community will likely shrink over time (cannot say 
how fast, though).

Hope that helps,

Klaus