Re: [xsl] killing xslt

[Jirka Kosek <jirka@xxxxxxxx>]

M. David Peterson wrote:

> I should also point out that Dave Pawson offered to post a "call for
> effort" on his highly visited/read xsl-faq which would be a tremendous
> way to rally further support especially as the project gets into the
> fine tuning and massaging of the code base to take advantage of the .NET
> platform and the differences it has between the Java platform.  As you
> said it would be lovely to get absolute precision from the Beta of
> version 3 of the Java to C#/.NET conversion tool but highly unlikely and
> therefore this will require the artisan style craftsmanship of several
> developers if we want to get a release out to the public within a timely
> manner.

I'm just formulating theme for my PhD thesis. Finally I decided that
"Implementing XSLT 2.0 in .NET" will be an interesting one. As am I
thinking about this topic, there are several ways to go:

1. Automatically translate Java code of Saxon to C# (this is the way you
propose)

2. On-the-fly translation of XSLT 2.0 stylesheet into XSLT 1.0 + EXSLT +
scripts

3. Write own XSLT 2.0 engine on the top of XQuery/XPath engine in .NET
Framework 2.0

4. Write whole XSLT 2.0 engine from scratch
    - as interpreter
    - as preprocesor which generates C# code
    - as direct MSIL code (.NET byte-code) generator

I plan to explore all possibilities and of course we can share
experience from 1st approach.

It is hard to predict something before detailed analysis, but I think
that finally I will use 2nd or 3rd approach as it allows reuse of very
fast XLST (or at least XPath) engine in .NET and allows smooth
integration with rest of System.Xml -- using XmlDocument or
XPathDocument as source tree representation, modelling XSLT API after
System.Xml.Xsl.

					Jirka

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   Jirka Kosek     e-mail: jirka@xxxxxxxx     http://www.kosek.cz
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   Profesionalnm 9kolenm a poradenstvm v oblasti technologim XML.
         DocBook 18.-19.5.                 XSLT 24.-26.5.
         XML pro v}vojaxe 7.-8.6.          XSL-FO 16.6.
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