Installation of Saxon simply involves unzipping the supplied download file into a suitable directory. The procedure is the same for the Standard product and the Schema-Aware product. The two products can co-exist in the same directory or in different directories.
One of the files that will be created in this directory is the principal JAR file. This is saxon8.jar in the case of Saxon-B, saxon8sa.jar in the case of Saxon-SA. There are additional JAR files to support optional features including the JDOM interface and the SQL interface. When running Saxon, the principal JAR file should be on the class path. The class path is normally represented by an environment variable named CLASSPATH: see your Java documentation for details. Note that the JAR file itself (not the directory that contains it) should be named on the class path.
The open-source Saxon-B distribution also includes source code. The modules included in the source code are also used, without modification, in the schema-aware product. Source code for the additional components of the schema-aware Saxon-SA product is not provided.
Saxon no longer includes a built-in XML parser: by default it uses the XML parser supplied with
the Java VM. But you can use it with a different XML
parser if you wish. To do this from the command line, specify the required parser using the
-x or -y options; from the Java API, set the name of the parser class as an attribute of
the TransformerFactory
or Configuration
object.
User documentation, covering both the XSLT and Java interfaces, is included in the download in the form
of extensive javadoc
specifications. Be sure to read the package summaries, which give an overview
in the form of a user guide.