If you've been following along, you already know how to parse XML documents using both SAX and the DOM with the Java-based Xerces XML parser. But why stop there? In this article, take your Java/XML skills to the next level by converting your XML into other formats with the very powerful Xalan XSLT engine
The past couple of weeks have been fairly hectic. I've finally got my arms around Java-based XML parsing with the Xerces parser, and have successfully figured out the basics of SAX and DOM programming with Xerces. Hey, I even managed to do some simple XML-to-HTML conversion by adding a little JSP to the mix.
In this article, I'm going to take things further, exploring yet another addition to the Java/XML family. It's called Xalan, and it's an XSLT transformation engine that should substantially simplify the task of converting, or "transforming", XML documents into other formats. I'll be looking at the basics of the Xalan engine, demonstrating how to write Java applications that can be used to convert XML data into regular ASCII text files and browser-readable HTML. And, of course, I'll come up with a number of silly examples to amuse myself (and hopefully, you).
