Re: [xsl] Newbie question on XSL transformations: multiple sorts on element attr

["James A. Robinson" <jim.robinson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> I'd like to use only one language (C) for my business logic and to call 
> the xslt engine.
> Now I use c for business logic and in my presentation layer I call C api 
> of libxslt to apply stylesheets to my data (formatted in xml).

I don't know if perhaps this is straying more into the "how to design
software architecture" range of discussion, but...  What we decided to
do was hook the best XSLT engine we could find into a web service.

Perl, C, or Java which needs a transform done dispatch a request to the
web service to let that engine perform the XSLT transformation.  The web
service keeps track of stylesheets, caching them the first time they
are compiled, and handles the Source and Result streams.  The results
can then be read off of NFS (or, I suppose, could be fetched via some
other service).

This worked out quite well for our particular needs: It's able to chew
through 1,721 journal articles and spit out 11,934 transform results
in about 90 seconds, running on good but still pretty much commodity
hardware.  I think that breaks down to 52-52ms per article. This includes
the overhead of the network call to dispatch the job.

The key bits were a) a really good XSLT engine (we use Saxon), and b)
stylesheet caching, and of course c) a business model that can use
this workflow.  If you're planning to deploy your product or whatever
off-site, I imagine this will be a useless idea. :)

Jim

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James A. Robinson                       jim.robinson@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Stanford University HighWire Press      http://highwire.stanford.edu/
+1 650 7237294 (Work)                   +1 650 7259335 (Fax)