[PROPOSAL]: Add support for JAXP 1.4 to Xerces-J

Hi everyone,

With the Xerces 2.8.0 release out of the way, I would like to propose that 
we begin work on JAXP 1.4 [1][2] (which is nearing finalization). For 
those who haven't been following its development, JAXP 1.4 is a minor 
update to JAXP 1.3; the largest technical change being the addition of 
StAX (JSR 173) [3] and new Source/Result classes (see the 
javax.xml.transform.stax package) which can be used with transformers and 
validators. It is being included in Java SE 6.0.

Depending on how much interest there is and how much time people have it 
might take several releases to complete an implementation in Xerces. If 
you'd like to see a complete StAX implementation sooner rather than later, 
and you're interested in contributing to Xerces, here's a great 
opportunity to work on an important piece. In the meantime so that Xerces 
comes with StAX support out of the box, the distribution could include an 
implementation which is known to pass the TCK (and is available under an 
acceptable license [4]). It would be replaced by the Xerces implementation 
once it's complete.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

[1] https://jaxp-sources.dev.java.net/nonav/docs/spec/html/
[2] https://jaxp-sources.dev.java.net/nonav/docs/api/
[3] http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=173
[4] http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html#category-a

Michael Glavassevich
XML Parser Development
IBM Toronto Lab
E-mail: mrglavas@xxxxxxxxxx
E-mail: mrglavas@xxxxxxxxxx