TheServerSide.NET reports that Altova has announced that they are releasing the XML engines used in the XMLSpy, MapForce, and StyleVision available to developers to use to create custom applications. The toolset, called AltovaXML contains an XML validating parser, XSLT 1.0 and 2.0 engines, and an XQuery engine.

    AltovaXML includes COM, Java, and .NET interfaces so that it can be used from a variety of different applications. You can also call its functionality from the command line. There is no license keycode required to activate AltovaXML™, and you may use it in your applications royalty-free.

    AltovaXML features include:

        * Well-formedness checking
        * Validation based on DTD or XML Schema
        * XML transformations via XSLT 1.0
        * Schema-aware XML transformations via XSLT 2.0
        * XML queries and transformations via XQuery
        * Command line operations
        * COM interface
        * Java interface
        * .NET interface

These engines are being offered royalty free and are available for download at Altova's AltovaXML Website.

so, the xml giant released its core engine for us to use,thanx a lot
while the java appear to be performing very well as it is native function,it is unfortunatly non standard interface (no JAXP) and we cannot even obtain DOM tree or sax events (please correct me)
and they do not expose the whole api,as u cannot step through xslt functions or any of altova fancy features, u can only transform
thanks altova

If you want serious Java-binding then C24's Integration Objects "C24-IO" is now free for non-commercial AND commercial usage.

While XMLSpy has a great GUI for working with XML and schemas, C24's Integration Objects offers advanced Java-binding to almost anything, I don't want to knock XMLSpy, it's a powerful tool but combined with C24-IO you can generate some serious Java code for your XML.

Integration Objects was build around the requirements of the wholesale banking integration needs and supports standards such as FpML (all version to 4.2).

With the free version you also get ANT integration, generated ANT scripts for each binding, DTD and Schema import and export, model and component versioning, a text (CSV) importer, a graphical transformation GUI, an instance viewer for instance CRUD operations, a shell for very basic ETL/EAI (this is a development tool not and ETL/EAI tool), a model diff tool, CVS and ClearCase integration, XMI export, Hibernate generation and database importer and a few other goodies.

If you're working with XML, check it out.

Greg Smith
Senior Developer
C24

The page linked to says:

IO Open Edition is packaged to enable developers to familiarise themselves with, and to use, a fully functional evaluation IO toolkit...

How are these engines different from

1) javax.xml.transform packages for XSLT
2) XML Beans for XML Processing

Do they provide any out of box components that we can take advantage?