JAXP JEP: Update Xerces implementation in the JDK

[Alan Bateman]

On 03/02/2014 21:13, Martijn Verburg wrote:
> Hi Huizhe,
>
> Is there a possibility to look at having a more loosely coupled
> relationship between Xerces and what is core JDK? I'm thinking about (in
> combination with) Jigsaw that you could allow the Xerces components to be
> kept up to date more often (assuming API compatibility etc is retained).
>
Just to mention that are already service provider interfaces so you can 
deploy with other parser libraries (or a more up to date Xerces). One of 
things that we did as part of preparing for modules (JEP 162, JDK 8) was 
to rev the JAXP API to clean up these the service provider interfaces 
(for SAX, DOM, XSLT, XPath, Validation, Streaming, Datatype) and specify 
the use of the ServiceLoader. So we're in a much better place now.

As regards getting the Xerces code in OpenJDK in sync with the upstream 
project then that clearly would be desirable and probably more of a 
longer term goal. I'll let Joe speak to how much the code has diverged 
but one area of difference is that the original Apache code wasn't 
really intended to ever be on the boot class path or run with a security 
manager. In any case, I think this JEP is a good step as it brings the 
implementations closer and also revs the support on a number of standards.

-Alan