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Jaxen looks like a nice/extensible XPath project, but it doesn't not seem to be actively developed nor have dates on releases. Even the mailing list URLs are dead.

Anyone have any info on this?

Ashwin Jayaprakash
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4 Answers4

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Jaxen is still actively being developed on Github

reevesy
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Two commits in 2011: https://fisheye.codehaus.org/changelog/jaxen/trunk/jaxen.

The problem of Jaxen is that every XML library already has its own XPath processor and almost no incentives to switch to another.

Update: Yes, Jaxen has definitely been abandoned. The homepage is currently defaced and none of the devs seems to be able or care to fix it: http://old.nabble.com/Fwd%3A-jaxen.org-home-page-defaced-td27594582.html

Update (Sep 2012): Jaxen has resumed development in May 2012 after one and a half year of inactivity, and has since released version 1.1.4 (12 May 2012) and 1.1.5 (5 Aug 2012).

nhahtdh
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gioele
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  • Wasn't Jaxen used as XPath engine for JDOM? Could the fact JDOM hadn't seen activity in a long time have anything to do with it? There's suddenly been a new JDOM release only 4 days ago. I'm wondering how this will affect them... – G_H Oct 26 '11 at 22:43
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Update:

The sourceforge page last updated in 2013 states:

FURTHER DEVELOPMENT IS NOW OCCURING AT http://jaxen.codehaus.org

But codehaus was closed down in 2015.

So everything is now at jaxen.org however currently the domain seems to be expired. The google cache shows the last version.

Lonzak
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The last (latest) activity I saw was Elliotte Rusty Harold doing something w.r.t. his XOM project a couple of years ago.

JDOM, DOM4J, JAXEN, XOM, etc, probably have seen their peak usage. Java and XML has matured and the consensus is JAXP and JAXB together with the streaming API, with one exception: If you want Xpath 2.0, Saxon is probably the choice; it also has bindings to the beforementioned libraries (at least for Xpath 1.0)

forty-two
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  • For information, Saxon provides XPath 2.0 (and XSLT and XQuery) access to JDOM, DOM4J, and XOM, as well as DOM and its own native tree models. We recently measured (Saxon XPath + JDOM) as running 10-30 times faster than JDOM's native XPath, and Saxon XPath with its native tree model was 10 times faster again. – Michael Kay Oct 27 '11 at 08:04
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    I don't know where you get your information about "consensus" from. Who did you ask? JAXB works very well for very simple XML applications (the kind that are being displaced by JSON), but it's hopeless for document-oriented XML or for XML with a complex schema. And JDOM/XOM are vastly more usable than DOM or SAX (which is what I assume you mean by JAXP). – Michael Kay Oct 27 '11 at 08:07
  • Ok, "consensus" wasn't the best choice. It is of course only my personal interpretation after having observerd the activities on various mailing lists and fora. – forty-two Oct 27 '11 at 09:17
  • @MichaelKay - JAXB is successfully being used by developers to handle XML documents that correspond to complex schemas. Of course there is no silver bullet this is why Java SE offers many APIs under javax.xml.*. One of the strengths of JAXP/JAXB is that they are designed to be used together. – bdoughan Oct 27 '11 at 12:29
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    Perhaps I was just unlucky, but two projects I consulted to had got themselves into a real mess with JAXB - basically, they were finding that the cost of schema change had become too high. – Michael Kay Nov 01 '11 at 10:23