Effective server-side XSLT processor

[Martin Plantec]

Hello,

In another post, I mentionned I was using PHP with Sablotron 1.0 as my
server-side XSLT processor.

I have several websites, some of them with thousands pages. Everything
is stored as XML. For the past few years, I have been generating static
HTML pages through Perl scripts and uploading them. I am now
experimenting with XSLT, to see if the performance is still acceptable
(it would obviously be more convenient for *me*).

Now Tjerk and Nick warned me (in the other thread) that Sablotron was a
lousy xmlt processor with bad error reporting (Tjerk) and slow (Nick).

I am not sure I can use anything else, since I am dependent on what my
web host has installed. Nick mentions mod_transform, which I guess is
http://www.outoforder.cc/projects/apache/mod_transform/docs/

Apparently, one uses this by stating in .htaccess which stylesheet
should be used, and then the XML files are accessed directly by the
users? But I am afraid this wouldn't work, because I will probably need
to do some processing in PHP, too, before to deliver the web pages
based on the XML...

Any comment/suggestion/pointer welcome!

Thanks,

Martin

 

[Peter Flynn]

Hello,

In another post, I mentionned I was using PHP with Sablotron 1.0 as my
server-side XSLT processor.

I have several websites, some of them with thousands pages. Everything
is stored as XML. For the past few years, I have been generating
static HTML pages through Perl scripts and uploading them. I am now
experimenting with XSLT, to see if the performance is still acceptable
(it would obviously be more convenient for *me*).

It's not generally a good idea to use a real-time conversion server
for information which is inherently static or slow-moving, unless you
can justify the use of the resources by its convenience to the author.

Now Tjerk and Nick warned me (in the other thread) that Sablotron was
a lousy xmlt processor with bad error reporting (Tjerk) and slow
(Nick).

I am not sure I can use anything else, since I am dependent on what my
web host has installed. Nick mentions mod_transform, which I guess is
http://www.outoforder.cc/projects/apache/mod_transform/docs/

The biggest and best-known is Cocoon, which runs on top of Tomcat.
It's a resource hog (or rather, I suspect, the underlying Java
is a resource hog) but it's fairly stable and reliable.

Another alternative is AxKit, which is Perl-based; but I have major
problems with this as it runs only on a very restricted set of
platforms.

Commercially there are systems like PropelX (www.propylon.com) which
are pipelining transformers like Cocoon, but not restricted to using
XML-only or Java-only resources like Cocoon is.

[Claimer: we do some business with Propylon occasionally]

You may want to consider moving your hosting to a site which provides
one or more of these.

///Peter

 

[Martin Plantec]

Peter wrote:

<< It's not generally a good idea to use a real-time conversion server
for information which is inherently static or slow-moving, unless you
can justify the use of the resources by its convenience to the author.
This is the principle I went by so far. I will probably stick to it,
but I wanted to experiment with XSLT. Generating and updating the HTML
files is a bit tedious, and they also take up a lot of online disk
space (I also need the XML online anyway). Thanks for your comments.