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.