O'Reilly -- Top Ten Java and XSLT Tips

Top Ten Java and XSLT Tips

by Eric M. Burke
08/29/2001

My new book, Java and XSLT, examines techniques for using XSLT with Java (of course!). This article highlights ten tips that I feel are important, although limiting the list to ten items only scratches the surface of what is possible. Most of these tips focus on the combination of Java and XSLT, rather than on specific XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Transformations) techniques. For more detailed information, there are pointers to other valuable resources at the end of this article.

The basics of XSL transformations are pretty simple: one or more XSLT stylesheets contain instructions that define how to transform XML data into some other format. XSLT processors do the actual transformations; Sun Microsystems' Java API for XML Processing (JAXP) provides a standard Java interface to various processors. Here is some sample code that performs an XSL transformation using the JAXP API:

import javax.xml.transform.Source;
import javax.xml.transform.Transformer;
import javax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamSource;
import javax.xml.transform.stream.StreamResult;
import java.io.*;

public class Transform {

   /**
    * Performs an XSLT transformation, sending the results
    * to System.out.
    */
   public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
       if (args.length != 2) {
           System.err.println(
               "Usage: java Transform [xmlfile] [xsltfile]");
           System.exit(1);
       }

       File xmlFile = new File(args[0]);
       File xsltFile = new File(args[1]);

       // JAXP reads data using the Source interface
       Source xmlSource = new StreamSource(xmlFile);
       Source xsltSource = new StreamSource(xsltFile);

       // the factory pattern supports different XSLT processors
       TransformerFactory transFact =
               TransformerFactory.newInstance();
       Transformer trans = transFact.newTransformer(xsltSource);

       trans.transform(xmlSource, new StreamResult(System.out));
   }
}

You can click here to download a small ZIP file containing this example, along with an XSLT stylesheet and XML data file. The included README file explains how to compile and run this example.

Use this link for get more information

(http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/java/news/javaxslt_0801.html)