Woodstox 3.2 released
Ok, so this is not exactly fresh new, as the release happened last year (on December 28th). But better late than never.
1. What's new with Woodstox 3.2?
Since this is an incremental ("minor") release, it is fully functionally compatible (minus bug fixes) with earlier 3.0 and 3.1 releases. The only major new feature is that of implementing SAX2 interface. But that is a significant addition, due to its potential for legacy integration: Woodstox can now serve your SAX as well as Stax needs. SAX implementation is expected to be highly compatible, due to extensive testing using both full Nux regression test suite, and passing of SAXTest with over 99% success rate.
The only other piece of new functionality is addition of property WstxOutputProperties.P_OUTPUT_ESCAPE_CR (defaults to true), which can be used to enable/disable quoting of \r in output.
2. Faster Output
In addition to additional interoperability via SAX interface, the other major improvement is this on output side. Not only were all outstanding output-side bugs fixed (most of which were backported to 3.1 and 3.0 maintenance branches), but there were significant performance improvements as well. Big thanks to folks of Axis2 for their great suggestions!
3. Other fixes
And last but not least, most of outstanding issues were also resolved: from incorrect handling of base document reference for external entity expansion, to minor problems in Location (line number, character offset) update occuring with larger documents. For full list, check out Woodstox Jira.
4. Next Steps
So what's in store next with Woodstox? At this point, some API changes are needed to move things forward, as well as to allow some obsolete features to be removed. So, there will probably not be a 3.3 release before 4.0.
Another short-term task is to wean out StaxMate project: since it is being approved as a new main level Codehaus project, it can "leave the nest", and be removed from StaxMate Subversion repository. More news will be forthcoming regarding this event, in near future (in few weeks?). Stay tuned!
