Released Jaxen 1.1 beta 2 yesterday, so XMLC 2.2 can be released. New features: HTMLXPath implementation that can convert to upper-or-lower-case on xpaths, and SaxPath being rolled into the Jaxen codebase.

The major bug fixed is the ability to register extension functions in a namespace.

1.1 beta 3 should be coming up in the next couple of weeks, and will switch to support JDOM 1.0beta9 (they f#*king changed their API), and more bugfixes. Come on over and join the party.

For a little bit of history, I have started work on Jaxen because my current employer is doing dynamic xpath evaulation in Saxon, which while very fast in most areas, is very slow in that one. We are switching to a SAX pipelined filter architecture, where the stylesheet just renames elements (XSLT is good for that), and using Jaxen in the filters for the dynamic evaluation. In tests we did, Jaxen on DOM (0.07ms) was 7x faster than Saxon (0.5ms) in dynamic xpath evaluation. When you have a few thousand of these to do, it really adds up. I am not posting total results, because it was not intended to be a benchmark. We tested our application, in our environment, with our data, and decided that Jaxen fits the situation better. I would encourage anyone to do the exact same thing when looking at A vs B vs C.

My future with Jaxen seems to be bright. I am soon to start work on a Navigator for JavaBeans, and then a GenericNavigator to cross any model that Jaxen currently supports. Oh yeah, and maybe include an existing XOM implementation if I get the go ahead.

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