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.