Performance of various data merging methods

Recently I got the task to develop a Web Part which would aggregate the contents of a couple of RSS Feeds, sort them descending on the publishing date and display the top n of them. Thinking about how the whole thing could be done, I have found out that there are multiple methods to get things done. The Web Part was supposed to work on an Internet site so I decided to have a closer look at the performance of the various methods.

The first thing you notice is that the XSLT based approach is definitely much faster than other methods using DataTables. So if you have to provide a good performing data merging solution, you might want to check whether you are able to benefit of XSLT.

Impressive XSL-FO resource

I was looking for how to make appear the name of current chapter in a PDF header. This is called "running header".

Found Dave Pawson's site on XSLT, DocBook, and Braille. The FO section contains very serious stuff pretty above all other tutorials!

The running header requires no trick. It's a standard FO feature: define a marker corresponding to current chapter title / whatever (fo:marker) and retrieve it from the header definition (fo:retrieve-*).

Performing XSL Transformations with JavaScript

by Maxim Porges @ 11:38 PM
At Highwinds, we document release notes for our software releases on our wiki. While this is a necessary and sensible practice, I do find it a little tedious since it requires copying some of the information from Bugzilla to our wiki.

Since I am lazy, and Bugzilla allows export of search results to XML, I made an XSL style sheet to convert the results of a bug search for a particular release to wiki text that TWiki would understand. This was all well and good, but required me to go through a number of manual steps...

Software Review: XMLSpy 2008 From Altova

Written by T. Michael Testi
Published June 12, 2008
See also:
» Product Review: ColorMunki From X-Rite
» Software Review: NetAdvantage For .NET Suite- NetAdvantage For Windows Forms 2008 Volume 1 From Infragistics
» The Writing Was on the Wall But GM Couldn't Read It

XMLSpy 2008 is the latest version of Altova's integrated development environment (IDE) for XML. XMLSpy allows programmers to create XML-based applications and Web services in a more dynamic and easier to understand environment. The version that I am reviewing is XMLSpy 2008 release 2 which came out on May 7, 2008 and it is based on the Enterprise version. There is also a Professional version and if you would like to view the differences between the two, you can check out the feature comparison list.

XSLT, Second Edition

By Doug Tidwell
Second Edition June 2008
Pages: 986
ISBN 10: 0-596-52721-7 | ISBN 13: 9780596527211

Book description

After months of anticipation and delay, the W3C finally released the XSLT 2.0 standard in January 2007. The updated edition of this book offers practical, real-world examples that demonstrate how you can apply XSLT stylesheets to XML data using either the new specification, or the older XSLT 1.0 standard. Want to find out how the 2.0 specification improves on the old? This book will explain.

Integrated Support for XML Data Management

XML is increasingly being used as the language of data exchange. An XML document based on a DTD or a XML Schema contains data that conforms to a standard structure. A number of technologies, such as ebXML (Electronic Business XML), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration), and RDF (Resource Description Framework) are based on XML. New business concepts, such as B2C and B2B, e-services, commerce resource platform, peer-to-peer commerce and collaborative commerce, have emerged as a result of XML. In this article, XML data management in Adaptive Server Enterprise 12.5 is highlighted.

Database’s Role in XML Data Management
Most XML processing without a database is done in the application layer. XML processing in the application layer has its disadvantages. Parsing XML in the application layer doesn’t include storing and querying the parsed XML document. Querying XML data with XPath and XQuery with a query engine isn’t supported. Transforming data with a XSLT processor and storing data in a file system is less optimal than database-based transformation and storage.

DocBook XSL - ePub target is ready for wider testing

If you're using the DocBook XSL distribution you've probably already seen that DocBook XSL 1.74.0 has been released with ePub support. Note that the 1.74.0 release is an experimental release, and is made available for testing and evaluation. See the release notes for a note about DocBook dot-0 releases.

Utilizing XML and XSLT in ColdFusion MX

Macromedia ColdFusion MX brings a whole new set of features and advantages to web development—silky-smooth Flash integration, way-cool support for web services and other groovy stuff that will surely make the lives of ColdFusion developers easier and more interesting. One of the neatest new features in ColdFusion MX, and one which forms the basis for many of its other new features, is its native support for XML.

XSL Tooling Updates

XSL Tooling 0.5M8

With the release Wednesday of Ganymede, the XSL Tooling project will also be having a milestone for 0.5M8. This is primarly a bug fix milestone, and XPath content assistance is a bit more intelligent. There may be a few issues still left to be worked out, but over all support for content assistance should be better. As stated earlier there is a new set of icons for the XSL Editor, and Launching/Debugging configurations. 0.5M8 is the last planned milestone. We'll work on getting a couple of release candidate ready next, and hopefully have an official 0.5 version by the end of July.

Using Annotations to Transform LINQ to XML Trees in an XSLT Style (Improved Approach)

You can use LINQ to XML to transform XML trees with the same level of power and expressability as with XSLT, and in many cases more than with XSLT.

One of the reasons that XSL is so powerful is that you can write multiple rules to transform a node. The first rule that matches is the one that is applied.

Rapid XSLT 0.1

The project is still too early in its development life cycle to be compared to other, more mature, editors and IDEs. Nevertheless, it does provide a complete set of tools that a programmer can use for writing XSLT.
There are no plans to further develop this project.
Some of the features of this editor:
- Ctrl+Shift brings up a list of frequently typed XSLT elements with a shortcut letter that allows one to be inserted.
- Shorthand Notation supports two groups of elements that abstract nicely to programmatic constructs: xsl:call-template and xsl:with-param elements and xsl:choose, xsl:when and xsl:otherwise. They can be written using the shorthand notation as a method call and a case-default construct, respectively.
- Ctrl+Alt+arrow keys navigate between elements and attributes.
- User preferences allow inserted code to be customized.
- One or more elements can be wrapped with an inserted element.
- Multiple XSLT files can be opened and edited at once.
The download file contains help sheets to explain how to use the program.
What are its known limitations?
- The preferences window is not user friendly in that the options that should be set via radio buttons are set by typing YES or NO into text fields.
- When closing an open document, the user is prompted to save even if no changes have been made to it.
- Only one construct can be typed at a time in the shorthand notation text area. Therefore, a case/default construct may not be followed by a method call, and vice versa.

Opera 9.5 review

At 6.8 MB, Opera 9.5's install file is about twice as fat as the approximately 3 MB we're used to from Opera - it is even larger than the 5.7 MB install of Mozilla Firefox 2.0 (but not larger than Firefox 3.0 at 7.8 MB).

Opera attributes some of Opera 9.5's improved speed to better support for current web standards such as (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1 and JavaScript.

Testing XSL and Xpath with Java Swing

This week I finished a first version of a little java application that I created to build and test xpath expressions and xslt stylesheets.

I was very charmed with the little tool XTrans( http://www.simxtech.com/users/zc2/xtrans/). This smart tool is extreemly small (only a few KB) and enables you to edit xslt's, load xml files and transform them with the created xslt. Unfortunately for me is that it is a windows application, based on the MSXML parser. And I've not found a counterpart on Linux yet. Oh, of course you could do a lot of that with jDeveloper or XMLSpy. Maybe even better. But XTrans is so small and if you're working with xslt's, sometimes the only thing you need is a good ascii-editor and an xmlparser. And a little driver application that helps you with driving your xml and xslt trough the xmlparser.

XSL 2.0 Requirements and survey

The W3C XSL FO subgroup is working towards XSL-FO 2.0. The first public working draft of the XSL-FO 2.0 Requirements document was published at http://www.w3.org/TR/xslfo20-req/ back in March. The best way for the Requirements document, and an eventual XSL-FO 2.0, to reflect peoples’ needs is for people to read the document and provide feedback.

Some differences between XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0

Following are some differences between XQuery 1.0 and XSLT 2.0.

1. In XQuery 1.0, functions should be declared before use. While in XSLT 2.0, functions may be defined anywhere in the stylesheet (provided, the function body is a child of xsl:stylesheet).

2. In XQuery 1.0, the XML Schema namespace, http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema is not required to be declared for using the prefix, xs:. While in XSLT 2.0, XML Schema namespace should be declared if any reference to the prefix xs: exists in the XSLT stylesheet....

Using AIR for XSLT Processing

One of the features we're investigating for the next version of the media player requires that we be able to do client-side XSL transformations. I had heard a few rumors that AIR exposes the XSLT processor that's built into WebKit (which is AIR's embedded HTML engine), so I shot off a couple of emails to the AIR team. Sure enough, this functionality is exposed through AIR's Javascript API.

Definitive XSL-FO

The definitive guide to state-of-the-art XML publishing with XSL-FO!

XSL-FO (XSL-Formatting Objects) enables enterprise applications to publish graphic-arts quality printed and electronic documents from any XML data store, no matter how large or complex. In Definitive XSL-FO, one of the world¡¯s leading XML experts shows how XSL-FO is revolutionizing document publishing. The book offers concise, authoritative . . .

Volantis releases open-source mobile Internet toolkit

Mobile Web developers can make use of a new open source toolkit, released this week by Volantis Systems.

The Volantis Mobility Server (formerly called Framework) can now be downloaded under the GNU General Public License version 3. The Java-based software is a framework for building Web applications for mobile devices. The applications automatically is recast on the fly to adapt specifically to whatever device is accessing the Web content.

The approach tackles the same type of problem as a technique called transcoding, but does more expansively. Transcoding takes one markup language and converts it to another, says Watson. Some approaches made use of the Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) standard to convert XML documents from one format to another. "XSLT is not a programming language," says Watson. "To do the kind of one-to-many conversions as we do, requires very complex coding, and XSLT is just not up to that."

XPontus XML Editor 1.0.0.1

The version 1.0.0.1 of XPontus XML Editor(XPontus - Homepage) is out. XPontus XML Editor is a simple XML Editor oriented towards text editing. It aims to become the free alternative to commercial XML IDEs such as XML SPy or Oxygen XML Editor. The software has been entirely rewritten to support plugins, so most of XPontus features are provided as plugins which can be extended.
XPontus - Homepage

Hands on: open-source scripting environment Komodo Edit 4.3

ActiveState announced the release of Komodo Edit 4.3 last week, the first version of the cross-platform programming tool to be distributed as open source. Komodo Edit is now tri-licensed under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL, just like Firefox. Through the OpenKomodo initiative, ActiveState has been working closely with Mozilla developers and the open-source software community in an effort to create an open platform that can provide a foundation for scripting and web application development tools.

There are a few competing open source tools that don't have quite so broad a scope but are still worth mentioning. For Python development, I think that Eric3 (it has an excellent graphical debugger) and PIDA (it has real Vim integration) are both pretty darn good. For web development, I think the KDE-based Quanta editor is the best open source solution. KDE also has a pair of cool graphical debuggers for JavaScript and XSL...

XML and Modeling

Data modeling is a big thing at Burton Group - a significant amount of the airtime expended in the ether around the virtual water cooler is devoted to teasing out the way that models interact, the best language for expressing such models and what characteristics best define a good model. In a way this isn't surprising - many of the people within the organization are former application or systems architects, and as such have a common belief that nonetheless is one that application developers don't necessarily share: before you write a single line of code, you should have a reasonably deep understanding of what particular piece of the real world you are attempting to model in that code.

Schematron was set up as one of a set of schema languages by ISO, specifically, ISO/IEC 19757 - Document Schema Definition Languages (DSDL) - Part 3: Rule-based validation - Schematron. Schematron was originally intended to be parsed by XSLT (or XSLT 2), and indeed this is still the simplest implementation, but there are also increasingly a number of stand-along Schematron validators written in Java and C##.

XML processing in Ajax, Part 2: Two Ajax and XSLT approaches

In Part 2 of this series, Mark Pruett presents two more approaches to the Asynchronous JavaScript + XML (Ajax) weather badge. Both approaches use Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) transformations—one on the server side and the other in the browser.

Part 1 of this series introduced a problem specification: to build a weather badge that can be inserted easily into any Web page. The weather badge is constructed using Ajax techniques and uses data provided by the United States National Weather Service (NWS). That NWS data is provided in an XML format, updated every 15 minutes.

XSLT Profiler for Visual Studio Feb 08 Community Technology Preview

XSLT Profiler analysis is essential for developers if they need to develop reliable and robust software. The XSLT Profiler is capable of detecting the performance errors and defects in coding so that they are corrected at an early stage in the development, essential in reducing the overall cost of developing software applications. The XSLT Profiler tool is fully integrated into Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to provide a seamless and approachable user experience, combining several Microsoft technologies, including Microsoft XML Editor and XSLT Debugger, Visual Studio Team System, F1 (Performance Suites), and more.

Expand the Editing Capabilities of OpenOffice with XSLT

This tutorial shows you how to use OpenOffice's import/export filters to open your XML data as though it's just a plain document. From there, users can edit the document much more naturally and then save it back to its native format. You can also use this feature to easily turn your documents into XML data.

This tutorial is for users of OpenOffice, with a penchant for XML. If you're comfortable with the rigid syntax of the XML file format, and have dabbled with XML Style Language Transformations (XSLT), a world of possibilities opens up when you use OpenOffice as a custom editor for any type of XML-based data. This tutorial demonstrates the power of XSLT harnessed for the automatic manipulation and transformation of any XML-based data to and from the OpenDocument format, thereby bridging the divide between machine-readable XML and human-friendly hypertext.

Getting an Edge with Caching

Quick rendering of a page is a must on the Internet and on a company’s internal intranet. If that doesn’t happen, users’ patience is soon at an end. Technology platforms like SAP NetWeaver must therefore meet users’ expectations for speed and reliability and must be able to handle heavy loads. All that applies to 14 intranets of RWE, a utility based in Essen, Germany. Intelligent caching helps achieve the desired performance.

In this situation, RWE takes advantage of the newly developed caching functionality of Pironet NDH, a German SAP partner based in Cologne. The XML document is converted only when the document being requested has changed since the last time it was requested. If that is not the case, users access the result of the XSLT directly from the cache...

EditiX 2008 SP 1

EditiX is a cross-platform and multi-purpose XML editor and XSLT debugger (1.0 and 2.0), which helps Web authors and programmers use XML and XML-related technologies, such as XSLT, FO, and XSD schemas. It provides a lot of functionality within a refined IDE, which guides the user with intelligent entry helpers, and has real-time XPath location and syntax error detection. It allows the user to apply an XSLT or FO transformation, and shows the result in a separate view. It includes default templates for XML, DTD, XHTML, XSLT, XSD, XML RelaxNG, SVG, MathML, and XML FO. It can generate schema W3C, DTD or RelaxNG from a document instance.

Sun releases patch to address a number of serious vulnerabilities

A security vulnerability in the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) with the processing of XSLT transformations may allow an untrusted applet or application that is downloaded from a website to elevate its privileges. For example, an applet may read certain unauthorized URL resources (such as some files and web pages) or potentially execute arbitrary code. This vulnerability may also be exploited to create a Denial-of-Service (DoS) condition by causing the JRE to crash. (CVE-2008-1187)

The End of XSLT for .NET Programmers?

Microsoft's VB team is starting a series of articles on how to use XML Literals. Many of these articles will demonstrate how to replace XSLT code with VB by making direct comparisons between the two languages.

XML Literals is a syntax first pioneered for Haskell and later brought to Microsoft for use in C#. Not finding a home in either language, the Visual Basic team snapped it up and made it a cornerstone of VB 9. This should not be too much of a surprise, as the Haskell syntax was heavily influenced by VBScript's inline HTML notation.

In the first XML Cookbook article, Doug Rothaus demonstrates the VB equivalents to XSLT's , , , , , and elements. He also shows how to use XML Axis Properties in place of XPath.

Though the examples are simple, the VB versions are consistently shorter than the XSLT versions. Most of the gains are from moving away from XSLT's rather verbose syntax. Though not demonstrated here, VB also has an advantage in that you can call out to normal .NET code when needed.

InfoPrint Announces Availability of Support for AFP on InfoPrint 5000

InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, announces that its InfoPrint 5000 full-color continuous forms printing system is now shipping with Advanced Function Printing™ (AFP™) support, providing AFP monochrome users all the benefits of AFP for their full color applications and making TransPromo a realistic proposition for businesses that print transaction documents.

These new models also offer native support for applications that utilize PostScript and PDF datastreams, and Encapsulated PostScript and PDF objects embedded in AFP/IPDS™ datastreams. The system incorporates other industry formats -- including EPS, PDF, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, XML, XSL, PostScript, PCL and PPML

Understanding the Benefits of XForms

XForms is something of an odd duck. Originally intended simply as a modularization of the HTML components so that they could better work in a more XML oriented environment, the XForms specification very quickly morphed into the foundation for a considerably more sophisticated application, albeit one that had a few ... idiosyncrasies.


What emerged after XML, on the other hand, has bordered on the surreal. XSLT took a template matching approach to transformations and XML processing that was powerful but hardly intuitive (especially if you tended to be dubious about the power of recursion). XPath provided an odd notation for referencing the various parts of a given XML structure, while the recent completion of XQuery did the same thing for whole collections of XML documents.

X-Pubs 2008 Announces Antenna House Sponsorship - Antenna's XSL-FO Experts to Offer Expertise to Attendees

LONDON, February 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Europe's Largest XML CMS Conference Announces that publishing solutions leader Antenna House Inc. has signed on as a Silver Sponsor for the X-Pubs 2008 Conference - June 22-24 London, UK

XSL-FO is an interesting technology for our attendees in that it provides an open, non-proprietary publishing format, based on XML. By participating as speakers and sponsors, Antenna House's experts will be able to answer questions on how to apply XSL-FO to documents.

Monkfish releases new XMLBlueprint XML Editor version

Monkfish, a software development company based in Europe, which creates software applications for XML programmers, has released version 5.1 of XMLBlueprint XML Editor for the Windows platform.

The XMLBlueprint XML Editor can be configured to work with a third party XML validator or XSLT processor. The service can be used to create, edit and process an XSLT stylesheet and also preview the resulting transformation. Additionally, the tool offers a real-time outline displaying the elements in the XML document. This enables users to access the various parts of the document quickly.

The XPath Evaluator option provided facilitates the analysis, testing and debugging of XPath expressions.

JetBrains Announces Winners of IntelliJ IDEAL Plugin Contest 2007

JetBrains s.r.o., creators of intelligent, productivity-enhancing applications, announced the winners of its second IntelliJ IDEAL Plugin development contest.

First Prize XSLT-Debugger - enables interactive debugging $7,000 of XSLT stylesheets in IntelliJ IDEA. Second Prize Struts 2 - provides full integration of $4,000 Apache Struts 2 framework. Third Prize Database Navigator - a database development, $2,000 scripting and navigation tool (for Oracle)

dhtmlxFolders – Ajax Solution for Creating File Browser or Items Explorer Interfaces

DHTMLX Ajax Toolkit has been extended with a new UI component – dhtmlxFolders . This component provides flexible and effective solution for creating Ajax-enabled file/image browsers, product catalogs, web-shop interfaces, etc.

St. Petersburg, Russia, February 25, 2008 - DHTMLX has released dhtmlxFolders , Ajax/DHTML component that displays numerous objects with the same data structure in different views and layouts. The component can be used as a basis for file/image browsers, product catalogs, search engine results or any kind of informational resources.

dhtmlxFolders can be easily implemented in any Ajax-based website/application. Rich and robust JavaScript API gives developers wide possibilities to customize component’s view and behaviour. The component’s appearance can be defined through XSL or JavaScript and changed on the fly.

PartCover: New Open Source Code Coverage Tool

Last September Peter Waldschmidt, the creator of NCover, made NCover a commercial product. NCover was a free tool and had become a popular choice, especially among open source projects. Gnoso, Peter’s company, has continued to embrace the open source community by providing free licenses to open source projects. This has not been enough for some open source projects. In response PartCover has be receiving increased attention.

PartCover is an open source code coverage tool for .Net very similar to NCover. It includes a console application, GUI coverage browser, and xsl transforms for use in CC.Net.

SharpDevelop, an open source IDE for .NET, has switched to PartCover as of their Beta 1 for version 3.0.

ASF Grants Synapse Separate, Top-Level Project Billing

Even if the announcement that Apache Software Foundation (ASF) granted Synapse separate, top-level project billing last week didn't generate major waves of uproar of reaction and commentary, it remains a significant move to the overall state of a burgeoning open source SOA arena. Initially, after first catching wind of Synapse in early spring of last year, I was thrown off slightly by some of the divergent descriptions/understandings of the effort that were floating around the web and as is the case with incubated open source projects it was a rapidly changing code base looking to grow in a more concisely defined direction over time. Since this is normally the case with early stage open source efforts especially those that set out to tackle broad scale areas of competency like SOA...

...provided three main functions: managing virtualized connections, service management and message transformation. Previously, it was useful for exchanges made through SOAP-based Web services where management of the exchanges were available through the WS-* protocols. Now support has been extended to numerous open standards such as HTTP, SOAP, FTP, SMTP, XML, XSLT, XPath, JMS, Web Services Security (WSS), Web Services Reliable Messaging (WS-RM), and more.

BBC Travel News : TPEG

About TPEG

TPEG (Transport Protocol Experts Group) is a standardised format for travel news reports, allowing incidents relating to many different modes of transport to be captured in a structured way.

These links point to a live TPEG test feed, and show how it appears using different language entity files. To view the files you need an XML/XSL . . .

Microformats - Simple data formats for the masses

You have probably already heard about Microformats. You’ve probably also wondered what they are. So let me tell you: microformats are set a of predefined attributes that you add to already existing markup. These enable both humans and machines to easily access the data they hold. Simply, they are small semantic tweaks to your web pages’ HTML/XHTML that make available previously inaccessible information. This information can include...

Brian Suda has created several XSLT files to extract microformats from HTML. From that the X2V webservice/favelet emerged. The XSLT and favelet extracts hCard and to produces .vcf (vCard) files and hCalendar to produce .ics (iCal) files.

XSLT Profiler Add-in for Visual Studio Team System

XML Tools team has released the XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 - a quick and reliable performance analysis profiler tool that assists in the development and debugging of XSLT documents. The XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 allows developers to measure, evaluate, and target performance-related problems in XSLT code by creating detailed XSLT performance reports. The XSLT Profiler includes a wealth of useful hints for XSL and XSLT style sheet optimizations, which are essential for XSLT-based applications that demand maximum performance.

(Interview) Feed.us Skins Web Publishing Cat with SaaSy Cache and XML Gadgets

Feed.us has taken a shot at the content management market and one that strikes a distinctly different approach to solving the typical problems with light-weight publishing. Via the combination of software-as-a-service (SaaS), XML data transformation and flexible input and output APIs, Feed.us thinks they’ve carved a foothold in the market. If they’ve played the cards right, it could be one that’s going to make life easier for a whole lot of folks.

Using the Sciptomatic, you can choose what content gets pulled off our servers. By date, by author name, by date range, by categories, etc. Then you choose what fields to display using XSLs. Our system is all via XML, so the XSL tells the system what fields out of XML to display...

BPM and SOA, Cordys style

The BPM market is going through a change process and many of the old categorises are no longer appropriate, as BPM products all provide support for application integration and human workflow. One of the key sales messages from BPM vendors is the relationship between SOA and BPM. Cordys have entered the BPM market with a version 2 product that not only provides BPM to support SOA, but is itself developed on SOA. At the beginning of December 2007, I met Jon Pyke, Chief Strategy Officer of Cordys, to be briefed on their product and strategy. For those of you who have been involved in BPM for sometime the name will be familiar.

The SOA Grid uses existing JMS-compliant messaging systems. It also provides content-based routing and message transformation through XSLT. It does not require a separate Java EE application server, but provides its own lightweight environment that requires only a JVM...

The Business Case for XSLT 2.0

by Kurt Cagle In my previous posting (Imports and Tunnelling in XSLT2) I started down a path that I’ve been planning on covering for a while: presenting a solid business case for migrating to XSLT2. When I first encountered XSLT, after an initial period of attempting to understand the paradigm, I found myself both impressed and disappointed. XSLT is an often underrated technology, in great part because it doesn’t fit cleanly into the Algol-based model that is most commonly used today (C, C++, C#, Java, etc.).

I consider XSLT something of a jujitsu language - it is most effective when used sparingly, letting the XML itself do the heavy lifting with the XSLT providing just enough of the pivotal support to do incredible things. That’s why it has quietly become the silent partner on any number of different platforms as XML becomes more pervasive on those platforms. It is used within any number of Java and .NET applications, just another piece of the infrastructure, though one that does a disproportionate amount of the real work in applications that are increasingly driven by dynamic GUIs and web services.

MarcEdit 5.1 Update

Couple of quick updates to the program. Added a new variable to the global vars passed when doing xslt transfers (currently, these variables are, destfile, sourcefile and pdate. You access these as global parameters in your xslt file.

(Interview) Feed.us Skins Web Publishing Cat with SaaSy Cache and XML Gadgets

Feed.us has taken a shot at the content management market and one that strikes a distinctly different approach to solving the typical problems with light-weight publishing. Via the combination of software-as-a-service (SaaS), XML data transformation and flexible input and output APIs, Feed.us thinks they’ve carved a foothold in the market. If they’ve played the cards right, it could be one that’s going to make life easier for a whole lot of folks.

Using the Sciptomatic, you can choose what content gets pulled off our servers. By date, by author name, by date range, by categories, etc. Then you choose what fields to display using XSLs...

BPM and SOA, Cordys style

The BPM market is going through a change process and many of the old categorises are no longer appropriate, as BPM products all provide support for application integration and human workflow. One of the key sales messages from BPM vendors is the relationship between SOA and BPM. Cordys have entered the BPM market with a version 2 product that not only provides BPM to support SOA, but is itself developed on SOA. At the beginning of December 2007, I met Jon Pyke, Chief Strategy Officer of Cordys, to be briefed on their product and strategy. For those of you who have been involved in BPM for sometime the name will be familiar.

The SOA Grid uses existing JMS-compliant messaging systems. It also provides content-based routing and message transformation through XSLT . . .

Some XSLT for when you just can’t get the mapper to do what you want it to do

Recently I have been spending some (maybe too much) time on the msdn forums to see if I can help out anyone that is having a problem with BizTalk. I figure since most of my knowledge comes from reading blog posts, I need to do something that gives back to the world.

So on friday a post showed up about needing to map from one format with data in a non repeating header and moving it to a repeating element in a destination document.

iPhone SDK Feature Check

With the iPhone SDK due in the next two weeks, the question is how to evaluate it once it is out there. there will be the question of the market model, the question how it compares against the (soon to be revamped) Android SDK, and of course the question of how good it is as an SDK.

XSLT: there should be an XSLT implementation, ideally it should be XSLT 2.0, but realistically speaking, XSLT 1.0 already would be a good thing to have...

ASX and XML are incompatible

I have been working with various playlist file formats as part of my internet radio project. This has involved creating XSPF playlists from XML sources and using XSLT to convert from XSPF to the alternative PLS and M3U formats.

According to the Simple ASX article on MSDN:​ an ASX file is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based text file which references a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for a piece of media content. Having read this I felt that ASX files ought fit neatly into my XML and XSLT based architecture. Only when implementing this,​ did I discover that ASX actually has quite limited compatibility with XML.

XML Programming in Visual Basic 9.0

By now you've probably heard of LINQ (or Language Integrated Query), the new query technology coming in Visual Studio® 2008. LINQ-enabled languages like Visual Basic® give you a rich set of query operators that can be applied to various data sources, such as in-memory collections, databases, datasets, and XML. That alone is pretty cool, but Visual Basic 9.0 actually goes beyond that and makes XML a first-class data type directly in the language...

The problem with XML, however, is that it has never been particularly easy for developers to work with. Awkward and inconsistent APIs, such as the Document Object Model (DOM), and languages such as XSLT and XQuery lead to writing a lot of tedious code that is often difficult to read and understand. But with the introduction of LINQ and Visual Basic 9.0, XML development becomes much easier. In this column I will explore the current XML programming experience, how LINQ improves the experience, and how Visual Basic provides even more support when working with XML...

The future of XML

The wheels of progress turn slowly, but turn they do. The crystal ball might be a little hazy, but the outline of XML's future is becoming clear. The exact time line is a tad uncertain, but where XML is going isn't. XML's future lies with the Web, and more specifically with Web publishing.

It seems a little funny to have to say that. After all, isn't publishing what the Web is about? The Web was designed first and foremost as a mechanism to publish information. What else can it do? Quite a lot...

XSLT and XML office formats will also bring a lot of hidden data out into the open. Numerous business documents have languished unread in file systems for the last decade or more. Most of them are doubtless irrelevant today, but some of them contain important information that's been forgotten because no one can search it. Corporate developers will extract and repurpose information from existing Office documents, first by automating conversion to newer XML-based formats, and then using XSLT and XQuery to make the data findable....

Monitoring tool takes care of business

ActiveXperts Network Monitor 7.0 is a no-frills package for server, application and network hardware monitoring that is designed to be quick to set up and easy to use.

We downloaded a 30-day trial version and installed it on our Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition system. A Quick Configuration Wizard helps the user to get the system up and running. It begins by setting up and testing a Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server, after which SMS options are set up . . .

Reports can be run ad hoc, or scheduled via the Windows Task Scheduler. Report results obtained from a scheduled run can also be sent to any number of recipients by email, again on a pre-defined schedule. Format support includes HTML, XML, XML/XSL or comma-separated values (CSV). . .

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XML Database vs. MySQL Databases

Using an XML database is reportedly more efficient in terms of conversion costs when you’re constantly sending XML into and retrieving XML out of a database. The rationale is, when XML is the only transport syntax used to get things in and out of the DB, why squeeze everything through a layer of SQL abstraction . . .

. . . Combined with the power of XSLT, the output of a database query can be transformed into anything you may imagine . . .

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Announcing the XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008

XML Tools team has released the XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 - a quick and reliable performance analysis profiler tool that assists in the development and debugging of XSLT documents. The XSLT Profiler Addin for VS 2008 allows developers to measure, evaluate, and target performance-related problems in XSLT code by creating detailed XSLT performance reports. The XSLT Profiler includes a wealth of useful hints for XSL and XSLT style sheet optimizations, which are essential for XSLT-based applications that demand maximum performance.

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Google and Domino - Part 2 - Development skills you'll need

Out of the box, you can point the Google Search Appliance (the GSA) at your Domino website, let it crawl and index everything, and then try your new search toy. The search result pages you get back look eerily similar to the Google search pages you get back on any Internet search. Imagine that... :)

The search results are controlled by the use of "templates". These templates are made up of a LOT of XSLT that controls the look and feel (and everything else) of what appears after you click "Search". If you have no XSLT skills, you will be extremely limited . . . .

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The Most Complete AJAX Framework and JavaScript Libraries List(124+)

Ajax framework can help us to quickly develop web pages that can call web services and server pages through javascript without having to submit the current page.Recent Web-applications tend to use them to provide more interactivity and guarantee better functionality.There are hundreds of Ajax/JavaScript frameworks available — I spent some days to gather the most useful of them,if you know others not include in the list,don’t hesitate to leave your comment.:)

6.Google AJAXSLT
AJAXSLT is an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications.Because XSLT uses XPath, it is also an implementation of XPath . . .

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W3C XML is Ten!

To mark the ten year anniversary of the publication of its Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 as a W3C Recommendation, the World Wide Web Consortium plans throughout 2008 to recognize and thank the dedicated communities and individuals responsible for XML for their contributions ' including people who have participated in W3C's XML groups and mailing lists, the SGML community, and xml-dev ' through a variety of activities and events. XML is a simple, open, and flexible format used to exchange a wide variety of data on and off the Web. The success of XML is a strong indicator of how dedicated individuals, working within the W3C Process, can engage with a larger community to produce industry-changing results.

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XML 10th anniversary celebration set

The World Wide Web Consortium this year plans to mark the 10-year anniversary of XML 1.0 as a formal W3C Recommendation.

The now-ubiquitous markup language has found its way into multiple standards, including XSLT, for transforming XML content; XQuery, for querying XML databases and XML Signature and Encryption.

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