Contact Information: see
http://www.saxonica.com/contact.html
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This is the home page for the Open Source SAXON XSLT processor developed by Michael Kay of Saxonica Limited. It also provides information about commercial versions of the Saxon product available from Saxonica.
See also the project page for Saxon.
Documentation for the current release of Saxon is available online at http://www.saxonica.com/documentation.
You are invited to contribute to the Saxon project Wiki pages at https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/saxon/index.php
The latest version of Saxon is version 9.2. This release brings a significant change to the package structure of the product. Instead of the two versions of the product (Saxon-B and Saxon-SA) produced previously, there are now three editions:
Saxon-HE (home edition) is an open source product available under the Mozilla Public License. It provides implementations of XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and XPath 2.0 at the basic level of conformance defined by W3C. It is available for both Java and .NET.
Saxon-PE (professional edition) is a commercial product available at modest prices from Saxonica Limited. It adds a number of features to Saxon-HE, including support for Saxon extensions and extensibility mechanisms, support for new features defined in XQuery 1.1 including higher-order functions, and easier configuration of features such as localization for different languages, and support for external object models such as JDOM, XOM, and DOM4J.
Saxon-EE (enterprise edition) is the fully-featured commercial product, essentially a renaming of the previous Saxon-SA to reflect the fact that it now offers much more than just schema-awareness. As well as a fully conformant XSD 1.0 schema processor, and support for schema-aware XSLT and XQuery processing, it offers many other features including streaming in XSLT and XQuery, support for XQuery updates, and advanced query optimizer, compilation of XQuery code to Java bytecode, and much more. For full details, see the Saxonica web site.
Saxon 9.2 on Java requires Java 5 (also known as JDK 1.5) or later.
Saxon 9.2 on .NET requires .NET framework 2.0 or later.
Saxon-HE does not offer all the capabilities that were present in Saxon-B. Most notably, support for Saxon extension functions and other extensions is dropped, as is the capability for writing extension functions that rely on dynamic loading of Java or .NET code (a new facility for "integrated extension functions" is however available).
Users whose code relies on these features of Saxon-B should either purchase the Professional Edition product or stick with Saxon-B: the latest release of Saxon-B is 9.1.0.8, and although there are no plans to develop it further or maintain it, it will remain available indefinitely.
A comparison of the features available in different editions of the Saxon product is available.
The Saxon XSLT 1.0 processor remains available. The latest version is version 6.5.5.
The commercial Enterprise Edition from Saxonica Limited, supporting XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and XML Schema 1.0, together with early support of draft specifications XQuery Update 1.0, XQuery 1.1, XSD 1.1, and XSLT 2.1.
Note that although the download files are linked below, they cannot be used without first obtaining license from the Saxonica site
Source code for Saxon-EE is not available.
The commercial Professional Edition from Saxonica Limited supporting XSLT 2.0, XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0 together with early support of selected features from the draft specification XQuery 1.1
Note that although the download files are linked below, they cannot be used without first obtaining license from the Saxonica site
Source code for Saxon-PE is not available.
The latest open-source implementation of XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0. This provides the "basic" conformance level of these languages: in effect, this provides all the features of the languages except schema-aware processing. This version reflects the syntax of the final XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and XPath 2.0 Recommendations of 23 January 2007.
There are three files available: one containing executable code for the Java platform, one containing executable code for the .NET platform, and one containing documentation, source code, and sample applications applicable to both platforms. (Documentation is also available online)
Note that bug fixes are typically made available in Subversion as soon as they are available, and are then consolidated periodically into a maintenance release. Source code under development is not held in Subversion, and is not available until a tested release is issued. Sometimes prereleases of new facility releases are made available for testing; these are announced on the saxon-help mailing list but will not generally be advertised here.
The last release of Saxon-B was version 9.1.0.8. This was a complete and conformant implementation of the XSLT 2.0, XQuery 1.0, and XPath 2.0 Recommendations published on 23 January 2007 by W3C.
Saxon 9.1.0.8 remains available on both the Java and .NET platforms. Changes since Saxon 9.0 are listed in the change log. For the bug fixes in each successive maintenance release, see the Release Notes and Change Notes for the release on the SourceForge downloads page. Known bugs, including details of their clearance, are listed in the Bugs tracker on the SourceForge project page.
It can be downloaded from:
The last maintanence release of Saxon's implementation of XSLT 1.0. This product is mature and stable, and further developments are unlikely.
The download includes documentation, source code, Java executables, and sample code.
Known limitations of this release are listed here. This page will be updated with information about any new bugs that come to light.
The previous release of Saxon's implementation of XSLT 1.0. This product remains available because it runs in some environments that are not supported by Saxon 6.5.5, notably under JDK 1.1.
The download includes documentation, source code, Java executables, and sample code.
Known limitations of this release are listed here. No further updates will be made to this page.
The most recent version of the Instant Saxon product. Instant Saxon was built using the same source code as Saxon 6.5.3, but was packaged for ease of installation when using the Microsoft Java VM. Since the Microsoft Java VM is no longer a standard component of the Windows platform, this release has outlived its usefulness, but it remains available for download by existing users.
Note that Saxon performs considerably better using Sun JDK 1.4 than using the Microsoft Java VM, so for production use, the full product should be downloaded.
There is a custom Ant task for invoking Saxon XSLT transformations. This was previously issued as part of the Saxon product but has now been separated into a separate package under the Saxon SourceForge project, so it can be released under its own license conditions and in its own timescales. The download is here.
The Ælfred XML Parser that was bundled with Saxon versions up to version 7.1 is now available as a separate download. There are some situations where it is preferred to the Crimson parser that comes as part of JDK 1.4.
Also available on this site is the DTDGenerator program. This was formerly produced as a Saxon demonstration application, but has since been adapted to work as a pure SAX application, with no dependencies on the Saxon software.
Documentation for earlier releases remains present on the SourceForge web site: 6.4.2, 6.4.3, 6.5, 6.5.1, 6.5.2, 6.5.3, 6.5.4, 6.5.5, 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.3.1, 7.4, 7.5, 7.5.1, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, 7.9.1
For releases from 8.0 onwards, the documentation is not available directly on the web site, but can be obtained by downloading the software.
All known bugs are logged in the SourceForge bugs tracker.
This page provides links to these bug entries, largely in the hope that this will enable search engines to find them more easily. Note that bugs are listed under the release where they were first encountered; in some cases the bug may also be present in previous releases, and in a very small number of cases also in later releases.
Michael H. Kay
9 August 2010