use Perl

• XSLT tools (Score:2)

  by ziggy (25) on 2002.03.12 15:09 (#5798) Journal

  Why don't java class libraries come with an installation script that automatically installs the classes into a standard directory? That's one area where Perl scores heavily over Java IMO.

  I think you'd be spending your time better if you asked Andreas and Jarkko why Perl modules generally do the right thing when you try and install them. :-)

  All of the best XSLT tools are written in C (or Perl) these days, even if most of the XSLT tools are written in Java. Go figure. Daniel Veillard's libxslt (and libxml) is by far one of the fastest XSLT processors on the planet at the moment. Your best bet for converting XSL-FO to PDF at the moment is through TeX, specifically pdfxmltex, which builds upon Sebastian Rahtz's passivetex and (I forget the maintainer's name) pdfTeX.

  Then there's AxPoint, which is taking a very unique and underrated approach - create PDF directly from a well-defined XML vocabulary (and one that uses British spelling, no less!).

   

  As far as the first batch of XSLT books, they were all pretty atrocious. The latest batch seem to be much better. Sadly, the W3C loves using spec-ese to create these vocabularies, which makes it quite difficult to parse and understand. XPath 1.0 + XSLT 1.0 are notoriously bad (but not as bad as some other specs, like XML Schema). The good news is that all of the pieces are falling into place, now (finally), even if they weren't quite ready for prime time before.

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