Xalan comments

[Ben Hutchison <Be...@finetix.com>]

Hi Xalan Developers,

I work at Finetix London, a technical consultancy working with a lot of J2EE and XML/XSL technology. Over the last week, my colleage and I have been using Xalan-J 2.0.1 for XSL transformation, and we encountered a number of glitches and incompatiblities, which I describe below.

1. Xalan 2 does not appear to work with Weblogic 6.0. The reason seems to be that Weblogic includes and uses Xalan 1 classes in its core JAR file, which shadow the Xalan 2 files. This results in an NoSuchMethodError (segment shown below). If Xalan 2 is placed earlier than weblogic.jar, weblogic does not start at all because of a NoClassDefFound. This issue is FYI only: It seems to be a weblogic problem.

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError
        at org.apache.xalan.templates.ElemValueOf.execute(ElemValueOf.java:269)
        at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.executeChildTemplates(TransformerImpl.java:2202)
        at org.apache.xalan.templates.ElemLiteralResult.execute(ElemLiteralResult.java:739)
        at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.executeChildTemplates(TransformerImpl.java:2202)

2. I received a transform exception in weblogic because the system.property "org.xml.sax.driver" was not set. Is this required? It isnt documented nor shown in the examples...

3. When a null value is passed into Transformer.transform(in, out), it results in a message-less null pointer exception deep in Xalan code. Can I request some null checking on some of the most pivotal methods in the API, as this will save new users much time figuring out their errors.

4. When using Xalan 2 with Tomcat 3.2.1, the default config shadows some Xalan 2 classes with classes in jaxp.jar and parser.jar, so that Xalan fails to work. Editing of tomcat.bat is required to fix the problem by moving Xalan.jar forward.

5. Could the Xalan dist contain at least one example of using it from a JSP page?

On a more positive note, I have configured XML Spy 3.5 to use Xalan instead of MSXML for XSLT with no problems whatsoever.

Regards
Ben Hutchison