Re: [xsl] Good app to apply transformations automatically?

[Wendell Piez <wapiez@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chad,

My $0.02 -- Georges is right: there are a million
ways to do it. The problem isn't so much how, as
it is what's the best solution given your user's
level of technical ability *plus* the maintenance requirements going forward.

For example, on Windows an old-fashioned DOS
batch file could invoke Saxon on an entire
directory -- this wouldn't be incremental (that
is, all files would be transformed, not just new
ones), but it would work with a double-click on
the desktop or a shortcut from the Start menu.
That's about as low-grade as you can get. Going
up from there, there are many better ways to do
it (some of which Georges has mentioned), but all
of which require installation and maintenance
overhead (when the system setup changes, or a
migration happens, or requirements change).

In my experience it's best if even the most naive
and innocent users know something about what's
going on ... so my choice would very much depend
on who's on the ground and what they're most comfortable with.

If you're willing and able to maintain a Java
installation, Ant isn't a bad choice: simple for
simple stuff, but fairly capable of complex
stuff. I've got a routine in Ant which invokes a
tranform to derive a list of graphics files in an
XML instance to be copied, and then invokes Ant from itself to copy them....

On the other hand, the best of all would be if
you can encourage someone there to learn
something about what's under the hood, in which
case teaching them how to invoke Saxon from the
command line, plus using something like Kernow, might work best.

Cheers,
Wendell

At 11:57 AM 7/11/2006, you wrote:
> Chad Chelius wrote:
>
>   Hi
>
> > My apologies to all for not being more specific here. I have written
> > an XSLT that is a solution for a customer. That customer now needs an
> > easy way to apply transformations to XML files that they are
> > obtaining as output from another program.
>
>   The responses you got in this thread apply, IMHO.  For example
> Kernow, creating a little XSLT script with Saxon extensions that apply
> itself the transformations, a more "portable" script using
> collection(), a shell script, a custom application (for example using
> Saxon in Java, or gexslt in Eiffel, or libxslt in C, ...), etcetera.
>
>   Why none of these is right for you?
>
>   Regards,
>
> --drkm
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________________________________________________
> Yahoo! Mail riinvente le mail ! Dicouvrez le
> nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface rivolutionnaire.
> http://fr.mail.yahoo.com