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.

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.

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

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.

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 . . .

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...

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.