DOM to DOM processing options

["Bruce G. Robertson" <br...@mta.ca>]

Cocoon-users:

at http://www.heml.org, I've been using Cocoon for about two months now
simply to dynamically apply xslts to historical xml data. In fact, I'd
say that cocoon makes a pretty fantastic development
environment for xslt/xml: it frees you from having to run xalan over a
file by hand! Experimenters rejoice!

Now I'm working on a more complicated transformation, one that takes xml
historical data and turns it into SVG timelines. The nicest results come
when I use the java 2DGraphics API and java's 2d2svg converter. (If 
you're interested in this, steal my code -- its under the LGPL.) This
, however, returns a DOM Document object. My question is: how would
the cocoon community recommend that I integrate such a transformation 
into a cocoon site, keeping in mind that I'd like to make this code as 
useful as possible to other, non-cocoon approaches to xml. 

It seems to me that I have the following options:

1. Xslt-extensions as font-end to the DOM-Document-to-DOM-Document code.
 But even then xalan extensions allows only the return of document
fragments, not whole Document objects, making this a more than usually
ugly hack.

2. Make a Cocoon 1.* Processor, which would just be a wrapper around my 
code that does DOM to DOM. When I switch to Cocoon 2.*, I'll have to 
make this into a SAX-friendly thingy, right?

But is there something less cocoon-specific that I'm missing, like:

3. Write a Servlet?

4. Something else? Particularly in the promised land of Cocoon 2?

Thanks for your time and for the lively and helpful discussion,

-- 
Bruce Robertson, Dept. of Classics, Mount Allison University
http://www.mta.ca/faculty/humanities/classics/Robertson/