Citing overwhelming demand for open source XML and XSL tools, the Apache Software Foundation has announced a collaboration with Bowstreet, DataChannel, Exoffice, IBM, Lotus Development Corp and Sun Microsystems. XML has become increasingly crucial throughout the software industry, as well as the open source community, as a nonproprietary method for storing and exchanging complex data, said Apache president Brian Behlendorf. Building a solid reference suite of applications and libraries for managing XML will help ensure consistency of implementation between free and commercial software, and reassure developers that XML is a reliable choice for building applications upon.
Apache and its partners hope to come up with XML- and XSL-related libraries and applications within an open source development process. The project is being bootstrapped with donations from vendors and developers, and will be maintained by a project team. IBM has donated its XML4J and XML4C parsers. Sun threw in Java Project X and its XHTML parser. Apache’s parser will be called Xerces and based on IBM’s XML4C and XML4J, with the best features of Sun’s parser included. But there’s more: Lotus contributed LotusXSL, DataChannel added XPages and James Tauber, now with Bowstreet, donated FOP, an implementation of XSL for use in print. The Java-Apache community and Stefano Mazzochi donated their pure Java XML publishing framework, Cocoon, Exoffice and Assaf Arkin contributed OpenXML, while Exoffice and Keith Visco have given their XSL:P, an XSL processor written in Java, to the cause.
