Oleg Tkachenko shows how to make XML programming easier and to boost your productivity using XSLT and XPath extensions, provided by the EXSLT.NET library.

In Part 5 of this tutorial series on analyzing data with XSLT, the MindMap Research Team decides to tie their data in with other services, pulling information from Amazon Web Services in response to information unearthed in the analysis. Web services provide information in XML, but it's rarely in the form that you want it, so this tutorial explains how to create an application that not only retrieves the Amazon data but also transforms it into XHTML and outputs it to the browser. The stylesheet shows how to pull XML information from multiple sources within a single transformation and also includes a device that alerts developers when Amazon changes the Web service, since changes in the feed can break the application.

Yesterday I commented about XQuery moving forward in favor of XPath 1.0 and XSLT 1.0. Whether this is a good thing or not, Oleg Tkachenko has written a fine article concerning the XPath and XSLT extension, provided by the EXSLT.NET library.

For the biologist, the bioinformatic analysis of genes requires the compilation of tables of gene characteristics. To do this, data is often taken manually out of databases in an ad hoc fashion. Different databases (TIGR, MIPS, BLAIR, and NCBI, for example) give different outputs in different formats. We would like to be able to extract information from the databases in a common, structured file format in a way that allows for easy rearranging and processing of the data.

ColdFusion MX offers a simple and easy way to unleash the power of XSLT for manipulating your XML data. Here's how. From Web services to news and blog data feeds to configuration files, XML is everywhere these days.

Use ASP.NET and a generic XSL file to convert any XML data into an Excel spreadsheet. This generic XSL can be used to present XML reports to users in Excel via their web browser.

A new e-Government schema has been developed as part of the Planning and Regulatory Services Online (PARSOL) Project and has been designed to provide a standard for planning application monitoring data (used to monitor land use against local and national plans and policies).

I am not sure how I missed this, but CambridgeDocs, makers of a product for aggregating content and managing its publication through a variety of channels, released a WordML/XSL-FO converter that makes Word 2003 documents more easily consumable for their system (see http://www.cambridgedocs.com/pr_06_22_2004.htm for more info). I thought this quote from their press release was key:

This is a beginner's tutorial on XSLT and XML. Selecting a structure for your data in XML is completely arbitrary. You can represent the same data in several different ways. Below is XML that represents the same data four different ways. The XML represents a Census record. A Census record has a country, a year, a small size, and a large size. This information can be represented by elements or elements and attributes.

This is a small list about the XSLT FAQ.

Refactoring a Web-based order entry page with 3,000 lines of VBScript and HTML wasn't easy. But with a bit of XML, XSLT, and a liberal dose of JavaScript, our author got the page down to half its size.

XSL (Extended Style Sheet Language) is used to define the layout of XML documents in a presentation medium such as a web browser window or a printed page. XSL includes the transformation language XSLT, which converts XML into formats such as HTML, PDF and Braille, or into other XML formats such as typesetting languages.

XSLT is extremly powerful but limited in many important ways. For example, it lacks basic date handling functions. I recently ran into this problem when I was trying to format an RSS feed for my home page. Luckily, eXSLT solves many of these problems. Even better, there is a .NET implementation on GotDotNet Workspaces.

Perhaps some tricky implementation of XSLT could figure out if a stylesheet is streamable and switch to a streaming strategy.

Antenna House released first lite version of their famous XSL Formatter (XSL-FO to PDF). It's much more cheaper than full version (only $300 for Windows version), but has a bit annoying (at least for me) limitations:

Michael Kay is the author of Wrox press's "XSLT Programmer's Reference," the standard reference work on XSLT, and the editor of the W3C's XSLT 2.0 specification, which is currently in Working Draft status. His Java-based Saxon XSLT processor is one of the most successful and popular XSLT processors in the language's history. The branch of Saxon supporting XSLT 1.0 is currently at release 6.5.3, and regular readers of this column will know that the 7.x branch of Saxon has been implementing more and more support for XSLT 2.0.

This is not really a new trick, I must say up-front. In order to have intellisense on XSLT documents you must copy this XSLT schema file into the folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\Packages\schemas\xml. Restart the IDE and you're done. Enjoy!

This is Part 2 of the developer.com introduction to XSLT. The first part was about tools and the basic syntax. I recommend you read it first.

This article concludes the introduction to XSLT at developer.com. In the previous four articles, the series has covered the essentials of XSLT coding. The final article moves to more advanced subjects such as working with functions and multiple files.

XSLT is meant to change the form of XML, but you can also use it to perform analysis. In this tutorial, the second in a series, the MindMap team creates a system that enables them to pass parameters that not only determine the properties to analyze but also change the desired criteria using Web-based forms. And because it's all in an XSLT stylesheet, the team can change the algorithm or output without recompiling the application.