NineML 3.4.0b1

Hi folks,

There’s a “beta 1” version of NineML 3.4.0 up on the releases page:

   https://codeberg.org/NineML/nineml/releases

(I’m not pushing this one out to Maven)

This is a beta release; I don’t recommend using it for production, but I would like feedback if you try it out.

A short summary of the changes:

* There’s support for exporting compiled grammars. They load a lot faster.

* There’s extensive refactoring to remove most org.xml.sax dependencies. Lots of other coding changes that have no observable effect on the Java implementation. This is part of a broader effort to prepare the codebase so that the Saxonica transpiler can produce a C# version of CoffeeGrinder and CoffeeFilter for the fn:invisible-xml function in SaxonCS 13.

* Failure documents now have a document element named “failed” (not “fail” as previously). There was an unfortunate inconsistency in naming; CoffeeSacks produced one flavor and CoffeePot produced the other.

* Boolean command line options can now specify true or false explicitly. This allows, for example, a user to override pretty-printing (--pretty-print:false) even when it’s enabled in the configuration file.

* CoffeePot now checks the validity of configuration file properties.

* The “tty” option for progress bars has been removed. This lets me remove the jansi dependency and an irritating warning message from modern Java releases. The downside of this change is that CoffeePot can no longer detect when output is being redirected to a file, so it’ll write progress bars to the file if you enable them.

* Added a feature to automatically optimize parsing of rules that match a list of nonterminals. This can be substantially faster for long lists. The feature must be enabled with the “optimize-terminals” pragma. This can be done from the command line, from the configuration file, or in the grammar.

* Removed support for Saxon 11.

Feedback most welcome. The documentation is perhaps a bit behind, but I’ll try to sort that out this weekend. 

Related: https://so.nwalsh.com/2026/07/29-x-stack

--norm

Received on Wednesday, 29 July 2026 17:13:53 UTC