Just to double check here; I see the project page has both a saxon6,
Saxon-B and a Saxon-HE and we currently only ship a saxon (6.5.5) and a
saxonb (which I assume are saxon6 and Saxon-B respectively). Is
Saxon-HE the latest stable release?
If we confine ourselves to open-source versions of the product:
Saxon 6.5.5 was the end of the line for the XSLT 1.0 processor. It was
produced as a maintenance release in 2005, but there had been no
development other than bug-fixing since late 2001. There are still a
significant number of users, but generally I recommend people to move to
Saxon 9.x even if they are sticking with XSLT 1.0. It's not a trivial
move for everyone, of course, because over that number of years the
number of small changes accumulates to become quite a conversion minefield.
Around 2002 development of Saxon as an XSLT 2.0 processor began; this
continued through the 7.x releases; reaching 8.0 in 2004. At that stage
I formed Saxonica to develop the product, and split it into the open
source Saxon-B and the commercial Saxon-SA products. That continued
through a sequence of 8.x releases up to and including the 9.1 release
in 2008.
In mid 2009, with the 9.2 release, I introduced another repackaging,
this time into three variants (HE, PE, EE - for home, professional, and
enterprise). The aim here (and it was successful) was unashamedly to get
more of the serious commercial users of the product to pay something
towards its development, and this was achieved by discontinuing some of
the more advanced features of Saxon-B from the HE product. So Saxon-HE
9.2 is actually a subset of Saxon-B 9.1. (That upset a few people, of
course, but for me open source has always been a route to market, not a
philosophy of life).
Saxon 9.3 was introduced a couple of months ago, again in (HE, PE, EE)
variants: it's proving quite reliable, but the latest maintenance
release of 9.2 can probably claim to be the most stable version today.
So for the open source community, the choice is really between Saxon-B
9.1 which has more functionality but is a dead end, and Saxon-HE 9.2/9.3
which is being actively maintained and developed.
Regards,
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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