I made the switch to use Saxon exclusively for XSLT about 2 years ago. In that time, Michael Kay has made quite a few enhancements, including support for XSLT 2.0.

I kept running into memory problems with Xalan, and the had to use the endorsed standards override mechanism to get past the problems with the ancient version of Xalan that was bundled with Java.Saxon solved all of my problems.

I was fortunate enough to attend a full-day tutorial on XSLT 2.0 with Michael Kay at XML 2004, and will start creating my stylesheets with XSLT 2.0 and use Saxon to transform them.

Michael Kay has just released Saxon 8.2 (both commercial and open source versions) at: http://saxon.sourceforge.net/.

This new version implements XSLT 2.0 and XPath 2.0, and XQuery 1.0. This version reflects the syntax of the XSLT 2.0 Working Draft of 6 November 2004 and the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Working Drafts of 27 October 2004.

Thanks for the early Christmas present, Dr. Kay!

As you are all aware by now, the "Tiger" release of Java, version 1.5.0, was officially released today! Get it from java.sun.com.

What you may not be aware of, is the Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism. This feature was available in java 1.4, and was needed if you wanted to use a newer version of Xalan or Saxon than was bundled with the JDK.

After I installed Tiger today, I was working away happily, until I tried to transform some tech docs with Saxon 8. I soon questioned whether the endorsed override worked as before, or whether I'd have to find some new trick.

I'm happy to report, that the override is still there and worked just as soon as I dropped the newest jars in

/usr/jdk/jdk1.5.0/jre/lib/endorsed

More information on the Endorsed Standards Override Mechanism is available at: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/guide/standards/.