We just announced that we no longer support JDK 1.4 in JAXP standalone builds. The main motivation was that we found such requirement made it hard to maintain a synchronized source with JDK6. Recently, we have made some performance improvements which will be in the jdk6 update 14 release. Due to the requirement for supporting JDK 1.4 however, we couldn't put back the same changes we made in jdk6 since features such as generics, StringBuilder were not available in JDK 1.4.

Another consideration was that J2SE 1.4.2 has reached its End of Service Life (EOSL) on October 30th, 2008. It is no longer necessary for JAXP standalone to support JDK 1.4.

So download JAXP 1.4 Weekly or Nightly and give it a test. Our performance team's tests using SPECjvm2007/SPECjvm2008 have shown tremedous performance improvement in certain areas. Besides, there have also been critical fixes such as 6536111 SAX parser throws OutOfMemoryError and 6506304 java.net.MalformedURLException: unknown protoco: c which have "earned" many votes and comments demanding a fix on SDN. These fixes will also be included in JDK6 update 14.