Comment by smartmic
5 months ago
Well, it's not as if this is the first free alternative. Here is a wonderful, incredibly powerful tool, not written in Java, but in Free Pascal, which is probably too often underestimated: Xidel[1]. Just have a look at the features and check its Github page[2]. I've often been amazed at its capabilities and, apart from web scraping, I mainly use it for XQuery executions - so far the latest version 0.9.9 has also implemented XPath/XQuery 3.1 perfectly for my requirements. Another insider tip is that XPath/XQuery 3.1 can also be used to transform JSON wonderfully - JSONiq is therefore obsolete.
Forget to add, for latest XQuery up to 4.0, there is also BaseX [1] — this time a Java program. It has a great GUI/IDE for XQuery rapid prototyping.
[1] https://basex.org/basex/xquery/
https://github.com/BaseXdb/basex/blob/11.8/LICENSE (BSD 3-clause)
We also use BaseX to write restful backends with RestXQ - https://docs.basex.org/12/RESTXQ - the documentation itself is written in XQuery as well and uses a BaseX database as a source.
interesting, did not know about that one! Thanks. (Small) but XSLT is not covered by it which is my main usage of XPATH unfortunately.
I will do some experiments with using newer XPATH on JSON... that could be interesting.