This week an update for xml2 and a new xslt package have appeared on CRAN. A full announcement for xml2 version 1.1 will appear on the rstudio blog. This post explains xml validation (via xsd schema) and xml transformation (via xslt stylesheets) which have been added in this release.

XML schemas and stylesheets are not exactly new; both xslt 1.1 (2001) and xsd 1.0 (2004) have been available in browsers for over a decade. Revised specifications for xsd/xslt are still developed, but not widely implemented due to declined popularity of xml itself. Our R implementation builds on libxslt which supports XSLT 1.0 features plus most of the EXSLT set of processor-portable extensions functions.

• packages
• XML
• xslt

A research project often starts with a bright idea and an initial commitment of volunteer time, or perhaps, a fixed term grant. But what happens after that initial activity? How can the project continue to sustain itself? (We define sustainability as the capacity to endure. Software is sustainable if it will continue to be available in the future, on new platforms, and meeting new needs. [This is from slide 23 of http://www.slideshare.net/danielskatz/scientific-software-challenges-and-community-responses, though it may have been taken from somewhere else earlier - if you know where, let me know.])...

• community
• sustainability

Making packages is a great way to organize R code, whether it’s a set of scripts for personal use, a set of functions for internal company use or a lab group, or to distribute your new cool framework foobar to the masses. There’s a number of guides to writing packages, including http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/.

As you develop packages there’s a number of issues that don’t often get much air time. I’ll cover some of them here.

• development
• tech notes

A new version of jsonlite package to CRAN. This is a maintenance release with enhancements and bug fixes. A summary of changes in v1.2 from the NEWS file:

• Add read_json and write_json convenience wrappers, #161
• Update modp_numtoa from upstream, fixes a rounding issue in #148.
• Ensure asJSON.POSIXt does not use sci notation for negative values, #155
• Tweak num_to_char to properly print large negative numbers
• Performance optimization for simplyfing data frames (see below)

Use the Github compare page to see the full diff on metacran.

• packages
• jsonlite
• tech notes

Next week I’ll be in Washington DC to meet my peers in research community management as part of the inaugural class of the AAAS Community Engagement Fellowship Program!

The program, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has a mission to improve community building and collaboration in scientific organizations and research collaborations by providing a year of training and support to a cohort of scientific community managers. The Fellowship will begin in January 2017 when we 17 Fellows gather for a week-long training course with leaders in the field at AAAS headquarters. Over the next year we’ll attend monthly webinars, report on our challenges and successes, and attend mid-year and end-of-year meetings.

• community
• meetings
• rOpenSci team
• cefp