There are a number of XML/XSL resources available and more are appearing every day.
One of the first things that must be done is to set up some type of development and test environment. If you are going to be doing extensive development work, you may want to invest both the time and the $$ in a tool such as XML Spy. It is a full-scale development environment that will take at least several weeks to master. But it is also very powerful. And it costs ~$400, although you can get a free trail version that you can use for 30 days.
For shorter term projects or projects with restricted funds, a very good option is the set of free tools offered by James Clark. You'll want his XP XML parser, XT XSL parser, and XT-win32 executable. Once installed, including setting the proper path and classpath variables, you can create xml and xsl files which you can then parse and merge from the command line to produce an html document. This is a good way to an xsl stylesheet which you can then test against a sample xml document.
For processing within a servlet, you may want to consider the more extensive parsers provided by Apache. They include their Xerces XML parser and Xalan XSL parser and transformer.
Setting up James Clark's XT Test Environment
- First, get a rabbit. That is, go to Clarke's site (or the Course Tool's xsl directory) and download the XT-win32 executable as well as the XP and XT parsers.
- Place the xt.jar, xp.jar, and sax.jar files on your classpath.
- Place the xt.exe file on your path (it's the executable).
- Create test xml and xsl files.
- Use the following command to parse and merge the two to produce an html file as output:
xt file_name.xml, file_name.xsl, file_name.htmlObviously, once you have the test set-up in place, use it to explore xml/xsl and to learn how to use the various features available. Keep in mind that xml and xsl are not the same thing and that you will need to read tutorials on both. Again, the W3Schools tutorials are a good place to start, but there are many more available on the Web.