Question regarding the inner workings of AurigaDoc

[omgponies]

Hi,

I'm currently looking into AurigaDoc (aurigadoc.sourceforge.net) and it
seems like this documentation software is poorly documented itself
The program can create various output formats using XSLT and a CSS if
you write your document in a specific AurigaDoc XML syntax.

As I'm pretty new to XML and the software commonly used to process it I
wondered if somebody could tell me which part of the program actually
does the XML to OUTPUTFORMAT thing.

I googled alot, but so far I haven't found out much. My best guess is
that xerces (http://xerces.apache.org/) is used to do the actual
conversion to html. If other formats like PDF are requested as output,
xerces will convert the AurigaDocXML to FO and FOP will be used to
create a PDF from the FO. Is this right, or am I completely on the wrong
track?
(The xerces website was pretty confusing to me, and wikipedia had little
info about it, too.)

Here's a list of technologies used by AurigaDoc (as stated on their
website): Xerces, Xalan, FOP, JFOR, Java Help 2.0, Java Mail API, Steady
State Software's CSS2 Parser

Thanks for reading. Please be kind, English isn't my primary language

(BTW: My first usenet post, hope thunderbird is configured right)

 

[Joe Kesselman]

As I'm pretty new to XML and the software commonly used to process it I

> wondered if somebody could tell me which part of the program actually
> does the XML to OUTPUTFORMAT thing.

The simple answer is "Xalan". But let's take a quick look at how it fits
together with some of the other layers:

Xerces is a parser/serializaer package. It's used to read XML into a
format programs can use (DOM, SAX, or Xerces' own
internal-but-documented events), to validate XML against DTDs or
Schemas, and to convert from one of those programmatic forms back to XML
syntax. Xerces implements the JAXP parser APIs as well.

Xalan is the Apache XSLT processor. It generally uses Xerces to handle
input and output and spends its own effort on understanding and
executing the transformation described by the stylesheet. Xalan
implements the JAXP/TRAX transformation APIs.

FOP is the Apache XSL-FO processor. Its job is to take XSL-FO
page-layout markup (typically generated via a stylesheet transformation)
and render that into PDFs and similar exact-image representations.

I haven't used the other modules. Some of them are self-evident
(presumably the CSS2 tool is being used because AurigaDoc wants to
process CSS locally, rather than relying on CSS processing in a
browser). A websearch should quickly find documentation on the others --
for example, Google's first result on JFOR tells us that it is a
"FO-to-RTF converter", which would mean it's similar to FOP but outputs
a different file format.

Thanks for reading. Please be kind, English isn't my primary language

There's no need to apologise. Your written English is better than some
of the posts we've seen from native speakers!

 

[omgponies]

Thank you very much!

I don't know why, but I completely forgot about looking up information
about Xalan. It would have taken hours to figure this out on my own!
I'm still not 100% sure if I understood everything you told me, but
thanks to you I'm not completely stuck anymore and can have a go again
at understanding AurigaDoc and XML technologies in general.

Thanks again and greetings from Germany

 

[Joseph Kesselman]

My turn to apologise:

Xerces is a parser/serializaer package.

Of course that should have been "serializer".