ANNOUNCE: XIA 0.50 now available

ANNOUNCE: XIA 0.50 now available

[Marc A. Criley]

Version 0.50 of XIA (XPath In Ada) is now available on the McKae
Technologies website at www.mckae.com/xia.html.

This version of XIA is a beta release that implements a significant portion
of the XPath 1.0 specification.

The current release adds the handling of path expressions within predicates,
and adds/completes functions that work with node-sets acquired by the
evaluation of such paths. Therefore this release has sufficient capabilities
implemented that one may now consider it for actual XML applications, rather
than something to play around with.  Remaining core library functions and
capabilites will continue to be implemented in subsequent releases.

There is only one known significant bug: The parser treats "and", "or",
"not", "div", the axis names ("child", "ancestor", etc.), and node type
names ("text", etc.) as reserved words. Meaning that if an XML document uses
such a term as an element tag, referencing it as part of the path in an
XPath expression will generate a syntax error.

New and completed functions are count, normalize-string, sum, and translate.

The txia_test.txt file, containing a list of XPath queries that seriously
exercise the predicate filtering capabilities of XIA, has been updated (119
queries and growing!), as has the personal.xml and personal.dtd test files.

As this is a beta release, reports of errors (either in operation or in the
nodes retrieved) would be appreciated. Please provide the XML document (or
readable fragment), the query that was submitted, and a description of what
was expected.

The test directory contains a test_xpath program, a simple XML file and DTD,
and a script (txia) to run the test program and feed it a list of XPath
queries (txia_tests.txt) for testing.