SAXON

Via Cafe con Leche I notice that Saxon 7.9 has been released. The interesting thing is that Mike Kay has founded Saxonica Limited which will offer professional services and additional modules, including a schema-aware processor as a commercial offering.
I’ve used Saxon for a long time now. It’s my XSLT processor of choice. I’ve never bothered with Xalan or other processors as Saxon has always Just Worked.
Like any good tool Saxon is adjustable enough to help you solve any particular problem. Just recently I’ve benefited from both the saxon:preview which helped me deal with a large transform and the very easy extension mechanism that allowed me to invoke some Java code during a transformation (generating a SHA1 sum for an email address).
I think it’s good news that Mike is intending to continue offering the basic product for free and wish him well in the commerical venture.