Ant est surtout connu des développeurs Java comme un outil multi-plateformes très efficace, au moyen duquel des sources peuvent être compilés, assemblés dans des fichiers jar et exécutés. Mais Ant n'assure pas seulement les fonctions classiques de pilotage d'un processus de build Java : il peut également servir, par exemple, au pilotage de transformations XSLT. C'est ce que nous nous donnons pour tâche de montrer dans ce court article.

Après avoir vu dans la première partie de cet article comment faire traiter par Ant de multiple fichiers XML par un même processeur XSLT lors d'une transformation donnée, nous montrons ici en quelque sorte la chose inverse, puisque nous nous intéressons ici à la possibilité qu'offre Ant de traiter un même fichier XML par des processeurs XSLT différents (toujours avec une feuille de style identique)

XSLT 2.0 adds several features that greatly enhance the ability of style sheets to work with data. Apart from the benefits of being built on XPath 2.0 (which I'll discuss in next month's column), XSLT 2.0 provides many other benefits to the XSLT language, including the ability to:

• Group nodes
• Create user-defined functions
• Create multiple result documents from a single style sheet

Joe Slovinski creates a Progress Indicator object that uses XML and XSLT. This object has several uses, including updating the client browser of the progress of a data binding routine or the preloading of images.

Joe Slovinski creates a drag-and-drop object for folder trees. This control has the capability to drag and drop entities from one point within a tree to another or between multiple trees.

Joe Slovinski explains how to dynamically insert, update, rename, and delete entities within a folder tree. Providing features such as unlimited metadata support via XML and XSLT this version of the folder tree can be re-used to represent any array of data.

Welcome to Advanced UI Design Using XML and XSL. Each article in my series will demonstrate the creation of a specific user interface (UI) component using eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL).
This article explains how to create a custom, object-specific context menu of unlimited depth by using XML and XSLT. The context menu discussed here functions by taking an XML feed of a specific format and applying an XSLT style sheet to it. The resulting transformation is then printed to the client. The client handles all user requests to navigate the menu. The client used in this article is Internet Explorer 5.5+.

Joe Slovinski explains how to use XML and XSL to create a Web-based folder tree. Using XML and XSL makes this tree low maintenance and when transformed on the client can reduce load on your server.

XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation) offers an excellent vehicle for styling XML documents as HTML. However, it shows some weakness when the transformation requires extensive logic. When XSLT languages fail to complete the job, you can extend your stylesheets with Java classes and take advantage of both languages' features. This article demonstrates how to extend XSLT with Java. You will learn how to instantiate and invoke methods on Java objects from within an XSLT stylesheet. The article also demonstrates how XML nodes are passed to Java classes and returned back to the stylesheet for further processing. (2,200 words)