Welcome to our January newsletter. Maybe we're mildly obsessive about this, but in both the XML and Java communities we're currently seeing a marked emphasis on performance: with the W3C releasing a recommendation for XML-binary Optimized Packaging and Sun's latest Java, J2SE 5.0, achieving yet more performance improvements. For us this is an indicator that XML is moving from the periphery of IT infrastructures, as data feeds and messaging formats, to the core of mission-critical processes. This presents new challenges, along with acceptance of the case for markup over other serializations come demands for scalability and resilience of processing. We have been banging this drum in relation to XML change control for some time now, as the market for XML change control matures our emphasis on performance and reliability is proving its worth.

This month we have a brief overview of some new licensing options available for DeltaXML. We also have a Technical Corner article discussing the latest Sun J2SE 5.0 release.

We greatly appreciate your feedback... please get in touch if there's anything you'd like to suggest or discuss. Evaluation downloads of the DeltaXML Core API, together with full documentation and online demos, are always available at our website: http://www.deltaxml.com/

    - The DeltaXML Team.

Contents

In this newsletter:

• Recent DeltaXML Customers
• DeltaXML Licensing
• Technical Corner: J2SE 5.0
• Diary Dates

Customer Focus: Recent DeltaXML Customers

Recent customers include:

• Capital Printing  (USA, UK) (visit) - providing comprehensive printing services for clients in the financial services industry.
• AEGON Nederland N.V. (Netherlands) (visit) - a global financial services group with 2003 turnover in excess of EUR 2.5 billion.

             - DeltaXML is being employed in a midoffice project and is powering a publishing engine.
 [Read more...] 

DeltaXML Licensing

At DeltaXML we are constantly seeking to meet the individual requirements of our customers, who need to use DeltaXML in very diverse fields of activity.
To better accommodate such differences in our customers' profiles, we are pleased to introduce our new 'Team, Site & Enterprise Licence'. These licences allow for unlimited development of DeltaXML-enabled applications, and use for any purpose, within a specified team, site or enterprise. Pricing for this licence is based on the number of people having access to DeltaXML functionality, and ranges from less than a hundred dollars per person for larger sites, to a few hundred dollars per person for small teams.

In addition to the new Team, Site & Enterprise Licence, DeltaXML will continue to offer OEM Licensing as before. This is appropriate when the application in which DeltaXML is embedded is sub-licensed to other customers. For OEM customers, our policy is always to work with you to develop a pricing model based on your preference, whether according to CPU deployments, number of end-users or other appropriate metric.

Whatever your needs, please do not hesitate to contact us to discuss your licensing requirements in detail. 

Technical Corner: J2SE 5.0

Sun's latest release of Java includes such significant changes over the previous 1.4.2 release that the numbering has been changed - we were expecting 1.5, we got  5.0 instead. (Apparently "The external version number of this release is 5.0 and its internal version number is 1.5.0".) This release introduces many new features generally useful to Java programmers, such as generics and typesafe enumerations, as well as further performance improvements. Of most interest to the XML community, however, and to DeltaXML customers in particular, are some changes to the JAXP APIs, the "Java API for XML Processing", now updated to JAXP version 1.3. These improvements include:

• Validator and XML-Include support
• DOM Level 3
• SAX 2.0.2  

Of direct relevance to DeltaXML users are changes to some of the underlying implementations used in the API and in particular:

	J2SE 1.4.1/1.4.2	J2SE 5.0
SAX parsing	Crimson	Xerces
XSLT transformation	Xalan-J 2.4.1 interpreted	Xalan-J 2.6.2 compiled (XSLTC)

Since DeltaXML code adheres to the relevant SAX, JAXP and XSLT standards these changes of implementation should have little effect. The most noticeable change that we have identified is a different formatting of error messages and exceptions, no changes should be required to application code.

If you would like to take advantage of the speed improvements in J2SE 5.0 more generally but would prefer to use a different SAX parser or XSLT engine, there are two mechanisms available to configure your software at run-time. The run-time pluggability mechanism (see the Javadoc for the factory newInstance() methods) is used to change the implementation class, for example changing from the Xalan-J interpreted to Saxon or XSLTC. The Endorsed Standards Override mechanism is needed to select a different version of the same product (that is, with the same implementation class name) to that included with the J2SE runtime, for example replacing the Xalan-J 2.4.1 included with J2SE 1.4.1 or 1.4.2 with the latest Xalan-J 2.6.2 release from Apache.

Various versions of the Crimson, Xerces-J and Xalan-J products, including those shipped with J2SE 1.4.2 and 5.0 are available from http://xml.apache.org/. The Saxon XSLT processor (free XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 products and schema aware products from Saxonica) is a good high-performance alternative to the Xalan-J implementations provided with J2SE. A number of other transformation engines, such as the highly optimized Gregor processor, are also available.

J2SE 5.0 is the most significant Java release for several years, it is an endorsed version of the Java platform and as such is fully supported by DeltaXML. Please do get in touch to let us know your experiences using DeltaXML under this release.

Resources:
Five Reasons to Move to J2SE 5: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2SE/5reasons.html
JAXP Pluggability: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/javax/xml/transform/TransformerFactory.html#newInstance()
J2SE 5.0 JAXP Release Notes: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/guide/xml/jaxp/ReleaseNotes_150.html

Diary Dates

http://www.xtech-conference.org/ - XTech 2005, Amsterdam, 24-27 May 2005

Weblinks:
DeltaXML news: http://www.deltaxml.com/news/

Please let us know whether this newsletter has been useful to you, we welcome any suggestions about information you'd like discussed in future editions. We'll be back next month with another edition.

© 2005 DeltaXML and Monsell EDM Ltd.

Newsletter archive: http://www.deltaxml.com/newsletters/
Newsletter subscription management: http://lists.deltaxml.com/mailman/listinfo/open-newsletter