Saxon 8.5 is available. I don't announce every new release on this list, but
this is the first for four months and there's a lot that's new, so I thought
I would take the liberty.

The exciting things in this release are in the commercial version, Saxon-SA
8.5. These include:

* hash join optimization for both XSLT and XQuery (can give fantastic
speed-up when processing large documents)

* a binary disk representation of validated source documents, reducing the
document loading costs when the same document is used repeatedly by many
transformations

* a mechanism for sequential XSLT processing of input documents without
reading the whole document into memory, making it feasible to process very
large documents provided the transformation is serial in nature

There are also lots of goodies in Saxon-B, including:

* Unicode normalization

* Ability for the collection() function to process a directory, for example

 
collection("dir?recurse=yes;select=*.html;parser=org.ccil.cowan.tagsoup.Pars
er")

  returns all the *.html files in the given directory, expanded recursively,
using John Cowan's TagSoup parser to convert them on-the-fly to XML

* Similar ability to use URI query parameters in the document() and doc()
functions (if enabled from the command line)

There are large numbers of small changes (listed in the documentation) which
I would recommend you take the time to read after downloading the software.

And of course, all known bugs are cleared.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/