In reading through the XSLT vs. XQuery string of threads over on xml-dev I was reminded of XSLScript and thought it would be worth noting for those unfamiliar with the project. In a nutshell XSLScript is 1 -> 1 mapping to XSLT, a way to write stylesheets in more of a scripting style and then compile them to true XSLT using the XSLScript compiler which is used in coordination with Saxon for the actual transformation of those generated stylesheets. There are utilities which are part of the compiler which allow you to get a memory-dump of the converted stylesheet if you so please.
While I am not one of the people who have a hard time reading or writing XSLT I do understand the fact that not everybody feels the same way. If you are one of those people who love the power of XSLT but hate the verbosity of the XSLT 1.0 syntax this may be what you are looking for.
NOTE: XSLScript has been around for quite some time although I can't really say how long. While I don't use it myself, from what I understand the script compiler and associated syntax is fairly strong and most, if not all, of the bugs have been worked out. The latest build is still sitting at version 0.7 which would lead me to believe that PaulT, the creator of XSLScript (among other things), still sees it as a work in progress, potentially looking to version 2.0 of XSLT to finish things off? You'll have to ask him that question. :)
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See also NiceXSL:
http://embedded.eecs.berkeley.edu/caltrop/NiceXSL/
Cheers, Dimitre
look at http://community.moertel.com/pxsl/
PARSIMONIOUS XML SHORTHAND LANGUAGE
open source, written in haskell, “It makes dense markup easy because it assumes that everything is markup to begin with. You need only delimit the few portions of text that are mixed into the flow of surrounding markup.”
Nice! Thanks for the link Brian :)
It seems that there may be quite a few out there that should probably be brought to light. I like the fact this this is written in Haskell as it makes sense to use a functional approach to shorthanding a functional-like language.
Let’s see how many other XML/XSL shorthand scripting languages are out there and then I’ll do a post to summarize them all at once.
If anybody else knows of another please comment as such and I will make sure that once they have accumulated I will get them posted so the community is made more aware of their existence.
Cheers!
What about XMLStarlet?
I call it a find for XSLT, as it alllows to specify fairly complex XSLT on a command line using unix ‘find’ style. Very useful for ad-hoc queries against xml files.
And if it gets more complex, XMLStarlet can provide the real XSLT the command maps to.