Optimus Prime - XSLT Transformation App


I'm working on a simple java application to manage transformations using XSLT via Xalan-J. Not sure if I'll use Cocoa-Java or SWING. Don't care a lot about cross-platformability, since it really only has to work on my machine...

I don't have a lot of experience with SWING (did a simple app a couple of years ago), and have no experience with Cocoa, so I'm kinda ambivalent (although having an excuse to learn Cocoa would be cool, I'm not sure I have the time to take that on). Since I have a brain-dead-simple command line Java app working already, I might just do it in SWING.

Actually, the command-line version works just dandy, but doesn't have the ability to remember state - which source xml file to use? which xslt? where to put the output? any parameters? open output in another application? which one? ...

Update: It seems as though Marc Liyanage has beaten me to the punch with TestXSLT. It seems like it's almost exactly what I was planning on building. Thanks for saving me some time, Marc! He's even released the source, so I might be able to tweak if needed. Cool.

I'll be playing around with TestXSLT (and his BBEdit XSL vocab) over the next couple of days. Should be interesting...

Update 2: It looks like the 2 XSLT libraries used in TestXSL (Libxslt and Sablotron) handle xsl:import and xsl:include differently than Xalan-J - that is they appear to fail with relative URIs... Not sure what's causing this, but it's not too fatal (yet)

Update 3: Marc has an older version of TestXSLT that he wrote in Java, and which uses Xalan-J, so for testing stuff out in the _real_ xsl library, there's a tool there. It's not as polished as TestXSLT 2.5, but it's better than command-line. I might try to graft a Xalan option into TestXSLT 2.5 using the Cocoa-Java bridge...


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