better support for multiple versions of SAXON

[sdm7g]

I would like to request better support for doing transforms with multiple versions of SAXON.

The version of Saxon in Oxygen 10 changed the APIs for external functions, and I had to
revert to Oxygen 9 to debug these stylesheets.

Saxonica is changing the licensing for Saxon and adding another level -- instead of Saxon SA & B, there is Saxon HE, PE, EE (Home|Professional|Enterprise). Some projects may find that instead of upgrading to PE or downgrading to HE, they may want to stay with an earlier version of Saxon B.
( I'm not sure how all of the feature sets compare. )

I know it's possible now to add a different version as an external transform,
but I don't know if doing it that way fully supports XSTL debugging.

But, since I suspect that with the license changes, more people will be grappling with the
different versions. It would be handy to have an easier way to switch versions, or perhaps
if licensing allows, ship Oxygen with multiple versions.

[george]

Hi,

We understand that the new version of Saxon may cause some issues. However, the situation is not that bad if you take into account that:

- the version 11 or future license keys work with version 10.3 so if you need debugging exactly with Saxon 9.1 then you can use version 10.3 that is available from our software archive page
http://www.oxygenxml.com/software_archive.html

- You will need to use version 10.3/Saxon 9.1 in debugging only if there are differences between Saxon 9.1 and Saxon 9.2, otherwise you can equally debug with Saxon 9.2. These differences are expected to be few and in general issues of 9.1 corrected in 9.2.

To conclude, we understand the requirement for supporting different versions of the same XSLT processor and we keep this issue open and probably we will implement this support in the future.

As a side note, the support we added recently for XProc allows plugging in different XProc engines and different versions of the same engine, so we implement new additions in oXygen taking into account this type of issue.

Best Regards,
George