About Me

I work full time in Seattle and am taking INFO 498 winter term 2008 as a non-matriculated student. I usually work in Java on a Mac, so I am looking forward to learning about C# and Visual Studio and XML editors.

INFO 498

Last updated: February 14, 8:59pm, 2008

Jan 8, 2008

Since I don't have a program that does XSLT processing yet, I tried two different methods to read XSLT scripts: using the Firefox browser and by installing the Xalan and Xerces XML libraries on my mac and using the command line XSLT xalan processor. The downside to using Firefox is that you can't see the results of the template processing in the browser source. I used the Firebug plugin to look at the resulting DOM tree, but that was tedious.

To get Firefox to process the XML using the XSLT, you need to add an XML directive to the BantamChickens.xml file:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="BantamChickens.xsl"?>

Then, just load the XML into the browser, and it will display the result of processing the XML using the XSLT.

Xalan is better because it produces an output file. To install Xalan, I downloaded the xalan-j_2_7_0 and xerces-2_9_1 libraries from xml.apache.org and installed them into a directory called Lib. In my Projects directory, I placed the BantamChickens.xml file downloaded from the INFO 498 web page, and created a simple XSLT file, BantamChickens.xsl, that currently does nothing except put a few HTML tags into the output.

For some reason, both the result of processing with Firefox, and the output file created using Xalan are showing some strange characters that aren't in the input file, but I haven't yet diagnosed the problem.

You can find more details about using the command line Xalan XSLT processor on the xalan-j web page at apache.

Jan 9, 2008

Today I worked on Bantam Chickens, and was able to get an XSL stylesheet transform working: BantamChickens.xsl, which creates this html output: BantamChickens.html

It took me a long time to figure out how to select the correct templates to match the children of the original template definition (ie, the one that matches "/"). For instance, to select the <description> element inside Bantams, I had to use <xsl:apply-templates select="Bantams/description"/>

Originally, I had left off the select altogether, and so each apply-templates kept matching the first child template instead.

I wrote this XSL using a trial version of the Oxygen XML Editor which I downloaded and installed today, and tested the XSL in both Oxygen and Xalan.

Jan 10, 2008

The PenPals exercise XSL and HTML is below. I noticed that the ordering of the pen pals in the XML must be different than what Terry used to create his example on the class website, since my "second penpal" is Hortense, not Frances.

Jan 15, 2008

Wedding Chocolates

Organization

Van Gogh

Jan 20, 2008

This is the Bank Statements lab puppy. I tried to find a way to do a select "with a namespace" as a default so that I could say, foreach au:bank, find all name elements and amount elements, without having to specify au:name. I also tried to find a way to wildcard the namespace, so I could say, for each *:bank. I wasn't able to find a way to do either, so in order to list out the foreign statements, I specified the au namespace and the ca namespace explicitly in two foreach statements and all the selects within each foreach.

Feb 14, 2008

Album Validator and Creator

For this exercise, I combined the validator and creator into one application.