Overview of XALAN-Java

• XALAN provides APIs for transformation
• Xalan-Java (named after a rare musical instrument) fully implements XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and the XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0

XSLT is the first part of the XSL stylesheet language for XML. It includes the XSL Transformation vocabulary and XPath, a language for addressing parts of XML documents.

XSL stylesheets are written in the XSLT language. An XSL stylesheet contains instructions for transforming XML documents into XML, HTML, XHTML or plain text. In structural terms, an XSL stylesheet specifies the transformation of one tree of nodes (the XML input) into another tree of nodes (the output or transformation result).

In the following example, the hello.xsl stylesheet is used to transform hello.xml into hello.html:

hello.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<name>Hello</name>

hello.xslt:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

       <xsl:output method="html" version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" indent="yes"/>

       <xsl:template match="name">

       <b><xsl:value-of select="."/></b>

       </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

hello.html:

<b>Hello</b>

By default, Xalan-Java uses Xerces-Java, but it may be configured with system properties to work with other XML parsers. The input may be submitted in the form of a stream of XML markup (from a URI, a character or byte stream, or another transformation), a SAX InputStream, or a DOM Node.

Xalan-Java performs the transformations specified in the XSL stylesheet and packages a sequence of SAX events that may be serialized to an output stream or writer, used to build a DOM tree, or forwarded as input to another transformation.

XALAN-JAVA features

1. Includes an Interpretive processor for use in a tooling and debugging environment and a Compiling processor (XSLTC) for use in a high performance runtime environment.
2. Implements the relevant W3C specifications: XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 1.0 and XML Path Language (XPath) Version 1.0.
3. Implements TrAX (Transformation API for XML), now part of Java API for XML Processing 1.2, and builds on SAX 2 and DOM level 2.
4. May be configured to work with any XML parser, such as Xerces-Java, that implements Java API for XML Processing 1.2
5. Can process Stream, SAX or DOM input, and output to a Stream, SAX or DOM.
6. Transformations may be chained (the output of one transformation may be the input for another).
7. May be run from the command line (Please refer Process) for convenient file-to-file transformations.
8. Includes an applet wrapper.
9. May be used in a servlet to transform XML documents into HTML and serve the results to clients.
10. Supports the creation of Java and scripting language extensions. and provides a growing library of extension elements and functions.