Warning about Axis and Saxon before v7.2

This was a weird one that caught us earlier today. One of our developers had implemented a local preview of pages in our client application. In the end this ran an XSLT over some content XML on the local machine, spat the resulting HTML out to a file and opened it in the registered browser.

He was getting different results from those when the processing happened on the server side, and it was also different if he ran it in Eclipse or via Java Web Start. While initial reactions are to jump to some sinister conclusions it turned out that on the server, and in his Eclipse project, he was using Saxon (v7.0 which will become important as you probably guessed from the title!), yet in the JNLP file for the Java Web Start version there was no Saxon, so it was using the JRE default of Xerces.

Now Xerces and Saxon have been know to behave a little differently when it comes to XPath short hand (e.g. match="/Bob/Sarah" as opposed to match="/child::Bob/child::Sarah"), so this wasn't unexpected. So he put Saxon into the JNLP file and uploaded the appropriate Jar.

Mere moments later cries of anguish went up from another developer who had loaded this version of the client through JWS and something important hadn't worked.

As mentioned in previouse posts, the main protocol between our client and server is WebDAV, however for things that are in no way covered by this specification we implement Web Services. There is one which checks some user details and this was failing, at least as far as the application was concerned.

When doing development work we always run the connection through the Apache Axis projects TCPMonitor programme. So any time there is a problem such as this we can look at the HTTP messages flying back and forth and see what's going on....actually so we know who's to blame, me for the client side or another guy for the server side.

After looking at the TCPMonitor output the SOAP request was fine, it had been processed by the server fine and then it had returned a correct SOAP response.

Turns out that Saxon, before v7.2, was packaged with the Ælfred XML parser, which Axis, so it seems, cannot use correctly to parse incoming responses. An quick upgrade to Saxonv7.2 and no more problems.