After wrestling with XSL, HTML, and XHTML for weeks, I finally decided to simply create a Nexista extension which uses the Tidy library to fixup the output buffer as either HTML or XHTML. So far, its working great. I'm using it with PhunkyBB and its working fine. Hopefully this will make it a lot easier to switch between plain HTML 4 and XHTML output without having to edit any stylesheets!
I've been thinking a lot about XSL lately (as usual) and the idea of XSL pipelines came up. The basic idea is that an XML document can be transformed into another XML document via XSL. In that case, why not transform it again using another XSL document? As XHTML becomes more commonplace, it will be possible to convert XHTML into plain XML, and then back into XHTML - woo hoo!With Nexista, things are done a little differently, but the functionality is possible. You can use the curl action to get an XHTML document, the xsl action to transform it into the flow XML document, and then an XSL stylesheet to output XHTML and complete the cycle.
I've been working on some very interesting (in my opinion) XSL and javascript code recently. I mentioned it briefly here in this post about XML goodness, and since then I've been adding the code to more and more Nexista powered applications.The results are terrific. I'm quite pleased with how its working out, and really look forward to building upon these ideas.So without further ado, here's a quick explanation:
- Using XSL to transform XHTML snibbets into Javascript DOM code
- Doing so enables caching on the client side of the XHTML snibbets - the parts of the pages which don't change
- This results in faster and more efficient processing
I just checked in updates for almost all the nexista files. Joshua agreed to assign his copyright to the code to Savonix Corporation (my company), so I've updated the file headers to reflect this.NOTE: This does not change anything in terms of licensing. The source code is still and will remain free and open source software licensed under the LGPL version 2 or later. Now that Savonix owns the copyright, we may decide to license it under additional structures as well to maintain compatibility, like the MIT, BSD, or GPL v2.
I've been busy on the coding lately... and was able to check in a lot of fixes and updates to the Nexista development buffer, which has been half broken for far too long.The new system uses the PHP DOM methods for XHTML creation instead of strings. This thankfully keeps the output nice and clean when enabling indents in the output stylesheet.Lots of cleanups too, a new release is approaching...
One part of Nexista that has stagnated a bit is the LDAP data source connector. For some reason, I lost my interest in it awhile back, and never continued working on it.I've recently managed to compile TinyLDAP on Debian, so this has reignited my interest in LDAP a little. For me to continue with it, I really need to make building TinyLDAP a lot easier. I believe that there is a FreeBSD port for it, so perhaps I'll look in that direction.I was also able to get ApacheDS (a java ldap server) running on Debian, but in that case I simply installed java and downloaded a prebuilt deb file from the Apache site. It seems to run OK, but like OpenLDAP, it seems much larger than I need.
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