# Running Saxon from Ant

The custom Ant task for Saxon is no longer supported. Instead, all the required functionality is available through the standard Ant `xslt` task. In particular, it is now possible (with Saxon-PE and Saxon-EE) to specify the name of a Saxon configuration file as an attribute child of the `factory` element, which provides full control over the Saxon configuration used to run the transformation.

A new class `com.saxonica.jaxp.ValidatingReader` has been introduced. This implements the SAX2 `XMLReader` interface and accepts a number of Apache-defined properties, allowing it to be used as a plug-in replacement for Xerces to support the Ant `xmlvalidate` and `schemavalidate` tasks, using the Saxon schema processor including the option of using XSD 1.1 for validation. For details see Running validation from Ant.

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