XSLT Cookbook

Using XSLT from Java

Problem

You want to invoke XSLT processing from within a Java application.

Solution

You can invoke XSLT functionality from Java in three basic ways.

• Using the native interface of your favorite Java-based XSLT implementation

• Using the more portable TrAX API

• Using JAXP 1.1 (a superset of TrAX)

If you are familiar with the internals of a specific Java-based XSLT implementation, you might be tempted to use its API directly. However, this solution is not desirable, since your code will not be portable.

An alternative is Transformation API for XML (TrAX), an initiative initially sponsored by Apache.org (http://xml.apache.org/xalan-j/trax.html). The philosophy behind TrAX is best explained by quoting the TrAX site:

The Java community will greatly benefit from a common API that will allow them to understand and apply a single model, write to consistent interfaces, and apply the transformations polymorphically. TrAX attempts to define a model that is clean and generic, yet fills general application requirements across a wide variety of uses.

TrAX was subsumed into Java’s JAXP 1.1 (and more recently 1.2) specification, so there are now only two ways to interface Java to XSLT: portably and nonportably. However, the choice is not simply a question of right and wrong. Each processor implementation has special features that are sometimes needed, and if portability is not a concern, you can take advantage of a particular facility that you require. Nevertheless, this section ...