Saxon

We haven't made a decision yet, but I'm leaning that way.

We just stumbled over this as well, as one of my coworkers made the innocent mistake of creating a .NET 6 application, referencing Saxon-HE and getting various exceptions since they weren't really made for each other. After replacing it with SaxonCS, we were greeted with license exceptions, and setting licensedEdition: false in the Processor ctor produced yet another one (where even the parameter documentation hinted at "this only supports true at this point").

The obvious follow-up question was: So how do we use this when we don't have a license? And I didn't have an answer for it (which led me here).

So, hoping that we see a "HE" edition soon. Our journey to .NET 6 and beyond is still a few years in the future (due to a lot of .NET Framework specific baggage that we have to figure out first), so "soon" can also mean in 6-12 months (or even longer) for us specifically, as long as it does happen. But I'm confident it will happen sooner or later anyways, since Saxon is the defacto standard out there and a lot of both commercial and open source projects/products use it.

There is so far no release from Saxonica for .NET Core/.NET 3.1/.NET 5/.NET 6 that doesn't require a license.

I have, on my own, however, managed to IKVM cross compile both Saxon HE 10.8 as well as Saxon HE 11.4 to .NET Core (10.8 to .NET 3.1, 11.4 to .NET 6), see https://www.nuget.org/packages/SaxonHE11NetXslt/, https://www.nuget.org/packages/SaxonHE11s9apiExtensions/ and https://github.com/martin-honnen/SaxonHE11IKVMNet6SaxonCSSamplesAdapted for the Saxon HE 11.4 and the various packages https://www.nuget.org/packages/SaxonHE10Net31/, https://www.nuget.org/packages/SaxonHE10Net31Api/ and https://www.nuget.org/packages/SaxonHE10Net31Xslt/ for 10.8.

Thanks for the feedback.

You might like to try out Martin Honnen's build of Saxon-HE 11.4 for .NET 6 using IKVM.

https://www.nuget.org/packages/SaxonHE11NetXslt/

It's not tested or supported by Saxonica. It relies on a fork of IKVM which we tested at one stage and found wanting, but it may well have improved sufficiently by now to make it viable - you'll have to assess that yourselves.

Thanks for those links, Martin; I'll keep those at hand in case we need em!

Now that its been a few months and that SaxonCS 12 is out, are we any closer to a HE release?

As an Apple Silicon .Net dev, trying to use modern tech (including recent XML standards) not having a HE edition to use when developing prototypes or personal project work, all the stuff where an Enterprise license just isn't warranted, is getting... kind of painful.

The other day I genuinely looked at how hard it would be to use Python.Net (http://pythonnet.github.io/) to use the HE edition SaxonC Python wrapper library from my .Net code. I'd love to know if hacks like this are a waste of time because a HE release is on the plan for 12 once it is considered stable (which is obviously not a specific length of time away, just an indication that it is a nearer term goal than it was before 12 was released), or if its going to be some time away and I should continue with such workarounds.

We haven't made any progress on this because we're now moving the product line forward on such a broad collection of platforms, but it is still on our TODO list.

Note that it won't be "open source" in the accepted sense, because we're not planning to productise the transpiler used to build the product.

Not heard of Python.Net before, but might be worth exploring. One idea might be to have a look at using the C++ API in SaxonC, which should work with the .NET framework.

Pythonnet and SaxonC sounded interesting so I have built a sample .NET 6 project (under Windows):

https://github.com/martin-honnen/PythonNETSaxonCTest1

Any updates? Is there a timeframe as to when we might see something? Just trying to get a better idea for planning on our end. We're currently using Saxon-HE 10.8 on .NET Framework, evaluating SaxonCS 12.0 on .NET 6.0 and exploring other options. It would be good to know what Saxonica's plan is and whether there really will be an "HE" version available or not.

Thanks

It's our intent to do this, but we don't have resources allocated to the project right now.

Thanks for the quick reply, this answer helps with our planning. Would the functionality be similar to what is currently available with the HE version compared to the EE version where a license would be needed?

Thanks

Thanks for the quick reply, this answer helps with our planning. Would the functionality be
similar to what is currently available with the HE version compared to the EE version
where a license would be needed?

I think that’s a reasonable expectation, but we won’t really know all
the details until we start to plan the work.

Be seeing you,
norm

--
Norm Tovey-Walsh
Saxonica

I've started giving this some thought, e.g. whether to include the DOM and LINQ integration, and catalog resolution, and "integrated extension functions", and some optimisations, but no decisions yet. There are some things that are available in SaxonJ-HE more for legacy reasons than anything else. The aim is basically to offer conformant and usable XSLT 3.0 and XQuery 3.1 processors with minimum bells and whistles.

Thanks for sharing, I understand that nothing is finalized at this point but this information does help. Looking forward to the day when we can be free of both the .NET Framework and the IKVM version of Saxon. :-)

As much as they are excellent and logical ways to differentiate the product tiers. I'd personally like to advocate for not excluding specifically the LINQ functionality from the HE version.

The universality of the LINQ approach in the .Net world means a lot of people will tend to eschew things without it (at least this is what I see when I look around) in favour of libraries and tools that do. If having LINQ + XML is only an option with Microsoft's old XML libraries, then they will be likely to continue to use the old libraries in order to keep using LINQ with XML for free, which reduces the need to have libraries that support newer XML standards... if the HE edition is available and supports the Saxon powered equivalent to LINQ to XML, then that's one less barrier to entry for people already using Microsoft's LINQ to XML who unfortunately need to be convinced new XML standards are worth using.

Is SaxonCS HE part of the plan for Saxon 13?

It remains our intent to do this eventually, but we haven't yet scheduled the work and we have lots of other things on our plate.