I'm taking a break in my XSLT tutorial coverage for this XML tip, because I'm away from my office, visiting family in south Florida. With one eye out for hurricanes, and another on my 18-month-old son, I hope I can be forgiven for this brief hiatus in my planned coverage. The XSLT tutorials will resume in two weeks with my next XML developer tip. In the interim, I'd like to report on an interesting news item from Altova, the makers of XMLSpy and several other highly-regarded XML developer tools.
On July 25, the company announced it would make several of its XML validating engines available for royalty-free use within third party applications. These items include the following:
- XSLT engine for performing document transformations and related processing (versions for XSLT 1.0 and XSLT 2.0 available)
- XQuery engine for executing XML document queries
- XML validating parser for well-formedness checking and document validation
- .COM, Java, and .NET interfaces are supported to work within a variety of application environments, with command line calls also supported for scripted or batch use
There are several implications to this announcement. First, it means there's another player in the XSLT processor game, to give tools like Xalan and SAXON additional competition for such uses. Second, this suite provides a toolset that developers can use to parse and validate user input or content against a specific schema (validating parser).
Third, this provides a mechanism to transform content into HTML or other formats as per XSLT transformations defined (XSLT processor). XQuery permits search or query results to be integrated into XML documents for direct access, or themselves to be transformed into HTML or other Web-friendly output formats for delivery (XQuery processor). Together, the set of engines supports a comprehensive XML development framework comparable to anything else available to developers from other sources.
Those interested in checking out this royalty-free toolset, or examining licensing terms and conditions, should check out the download page.
About the author
Ed Tittel is a full-time writer and trainer whose interests include XML and development topics along with IT Certification and information security topics. E-mail Ed with comments, questions, or suggested topics or tools for review.
