SAXONICA

Saxon Documentation
Full Contents
About Saxon
| Introduction
| Getting Started
| What is Saxon?
| Prerequisites
| Product Packages
| Installation
» | Historical Note
| Technical Support
Changes in this Release
Conditions of Use
Using XSLT 2.0
Using XQuery
Handling Source Documents
XML Schema Processing
The XPath API
Standards Conformance
Extensibility
Saxon Extensions
Sample Saxon Applications
The Saxon SQL Extension
XSLT Elements
XPath 2.0 Expression Syntax
Function Library
XSLT Patterns

# Historical Note

Saxon has been under development since 1998. Almost all the code was written by one person, Michael Kay, which has resulted in a high level of design integrity.

Saxon was originally written to support an internal project in ICL (now part of Fujitsu), and ICL continued to sponsor development of Saxon until Michael Kay left the company in January 2001. ICL chose not to market it as a commercial product, but to make the code available to the public under the Mozilla public license. From 2001 through 2003 Michael Kay worked for Software AG, who continued to sponsor the development of Saxon as an open source product.

In March 2004 Michael Kay founded Saxonica Limited to provide ongoing development and support of Saxon as a commercial venture. Saxonica continues to develop the basic (non-schema-aware) version of Saxon as an open source product, while at the same time delivering professional services and additional software (including a schema-aware processor) as commercial offerings. The commercial product incorporates the code of the open-source product in its entirety, with the addition of schema-processing technology, and is produced in accordance with the provisions defined by the Mozilla Public License.

It is unfortunately not possible to release Saxon under any license other than the Mozilla Public License. This is because it is not practically feasible to obtain the necessary permission from all the people who originally agreed to the release of code under the MPL.

The name Saxon was chosen because originally it was a layer on top of SAX. Also, it originally used the Ælfred parser (among others); Ælfred of course was a Saxon king...

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