REDMOND, Wash., Oct. 31, 2000 — Delivering on its commitment to quickly implement the latest Extensible Markup Language (XML) standards, Microsoft Corp. today announced the immediate availability of its newest XML parser, MSXML3. This fully supported version is available for download from the MSDN® developer program XML Developer Center ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/ ). Less than three years after becoming a recommended specification of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), XML is being widely adopted and is yielding dramatic benefits for customers, who are already using the completed version of the Microsoft® parser to build and deliver applications that maximize the capabilities of XML.
“The successful delivery of MSXML3 through a Web-based release program allowed our customers to provide invaluable feedback to Microsoft at every stage of the development cycle,”
said Dave Reed, general manager of Data Access and XML Technologies at Microsoft.
“Their input, combined with Microsoft’s vision and leadership in helping shape XML standards, enabled us to quickly deliver an enterprise-class product.”
XML is a fundamental technology supporting the Microsoft .NET Platform, which will allow for the creation of distributed Web services that can interoperate in heterogeneous environments.
Lycos.com, a premier Web site of Terra Lycos, a new global Internet network reaching 91 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, is using MSXML3 to build XML-based Web services that help the company manage content flow from its partners in a high-performance environment.
“The XSLT engine performance in MSXML3 has helped Lycos.com to meet the high- throughput and processing load requirements that our site demands,”
said John Hotchkiss, vice president of engineering at Lycos.com.
“Also, its strict compliance with the core W3C XML standards and solid reliability allowed us to migrate seamlessly from several other XML engines to MSXML.”
Whitehill Technologies Inc. ( http://www.whitehill.com/ ), a leading provider of Internet infrastructure software for transforming data into Web-enabled business information, has incorporated Microsoft’s new XML parser into its Whitehill <xml>Transport, Whitehill <xsl>Composer and Whitehill Web products.
“MSXML is one of the most stable components we used in developing our products, and it delivers exceptional processing speed,”
said Bob Rybak, president and chief technology officer of Whitehill Technologies.
“We were able to plug in the XML parser and move from one release to the next without worrying about disruptions to our projects, which gave us tremendous peace of mind throughout the development process.”
Altova GmbH, a prominent software provider for European telecommunications companies, develops search-engine technology for use in telephone directory CD-ROMs and Internet servers.
“Microsoft’s new XML parser is certainly the fastest implementation of XSLT we have seen, and we support MSXML3 as the default XSLT processor in our XML Spy version 3.0,”
said Alexander Falk, CEO of Altova Inc.
“Microsoft has consistently delivered important improvements in standards conformance and new features since the initial preview release of MSXML3, which Altova views as an excellent toolkit for providing our customers with high-performance batch XSL transformation capabilities in XML Spy.”
In addition to those standards supported in previous versions, Microsoft’s latest XML parser – the programming component that implements the core XML standards and provides XML services to applications – adds standards-compliant support for XSL Transformations (XSLT), XML Path Language (XPath) and Simple API for XML (SAX2).
Along with enhancements in speed and reliability over previous versions, MSXML3 also introduces caching for XDR schemas, transformations and queries to significantly improve application throughput. The parser also includes a new HTTP service that enables scalable server-to-server communication.
Microsoft released the first version of the new XML parser in January 2000, and updated versions were posted to the Web in March, May and July leading up to today’s release.
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