[Biojava-l] Should we standardise on an XSLT processor?

[Simon Brocklehurst]

"Dickson, Mike" wrote:

> Your approach would certainly be my preference.  There is an unfortunate
> proliferation of specialized XML formats being developed.  A more normalized
> view that can represent concepts generally makes more sense to me.  Perhaps
> an XSL style sheet that can map from the NCBI format into the more general
> biojava format would be beneficial.

An XSLT transform for converting between formats is certainly what we had in
mind (but we haven't really looked in detail yet to see how much of a pain this
will be).    Also, we've been holding off putting any XSLT stuff into biojava
thus far because mechansims for adding Java extensions to XSL stylesheets aren't
standardised.  It turns out that, for bioinformatics stuff, building Java
extensions to XSL seems to be pretty much the rule rather than the exception.

At CAT, we currently use Saxon as our default XSLT processor.  The reason for
making this choice over Xalan is that Saxon was the more robust/reliable of the
two when we made the choice.  I have no idea whether Xalan is currently robust -
it may well be. Does anyone out there have strong feelings about using Xalan
rather than Saxon, or substantial experience with latest versions of both?
Would people out there be happy to standardise on Saxon, and thus the Saxon
method for writing Java node handlers for the time being?

Simon
--
Simon M. Brocklehurst, Ph.D.
Head of Bioinformatics & Advanced IS
Cambridge Antibody Technology
The Science Park, Melbourn, Cambridgeshire, UK
http://www.CambridgeAntibody.com/
mailto:simon.brocklehurst@CambridgeAntibody.com