Do you know Xalan or Saxon?

[Dr. Roger Wießner]

Hello!


I am a newbie to XSLT and need a freeware/GNU Tool
to get experience with this new topic.

Which one is a good XSLT? Xalan or Saxon, or which
one else?

Thank you a lot!
Roger

 

[Martin Honnen]

I am a newbie to XSLT and need a freeware/GNU Tool
to get experience with this new topic.

Which one is a good XSLT? Xalan or Saxon, or which
one else?

I think both Saxon and Xalan are regarded as good implementations of the
XSLT 1.0 standard.
Which one you choose might depend on other criteria, Saxon is a Java
application while Xalan exists as both a Java application and as a C++
application.
And Java 1.4 comes already with a Xalan version built-in.

 

[Daniel Parker]

I think both Saxon and Xalan are regarded as good implementations of the
XSLT 1.0 standard.

I'd recommend Saxon, it's faster and more conformant. The current version
of Saxon 8.x supports XSLT 2.0, and is the only free implementation to do
so.

Which one you choose might depend on other criteria, Saxon is a Java
application while Xalan exists as both a Java application and as a C++
application.
And Java 1.4 comes already with a Xalan version built-in.

An old buggy version, though. If you do use Xalan with Java 1.4, you should
update your runtime environment to pick up more recent versions of Xalan
(and Xerces as well):
a.. Create the directory %JAVA_HOME%\jre\lib\endorsed.
b.. Download new versions of the Xerces jar files, including
xercesImpl.jar and xml-apis.jar, and copy them to the endorsed directory.
c.. Download a new version of the Xalan jar files and copy it to the
endorsed directory as well (or alternatively copy saxon here.).
(Java 1.5 comes with newer versions of the Xalan and Xerces jar files.)

Regards,
Daniel Parker
http://servingxml.sourceforge.net/