RE: jaxp vs xalan

> Thanks, actually now that I've gotten into the "guts"
> of both JAXP, Xalan and Xerces a bit more, I can be a
> little more specific.  I understand that JAXP is
> simply a set of interfaces that enable one to
> transform or parse using vendor-neutral code.  As far
> as I know, by default JAXP uses Xalan v 2.4.1+ "under
> the hood" to perform such transformations.

It's true that in Sun JDK 1.4, the default implementation of JAXP is
Xalan, but strictly speaking that's a property of Sun JDK 1.4, not of
JAXP.

A useful tip is to include the line

<xsl:comment>
  <xsl:value-of select="system-property('xsl:vendor')"/>
</xsl:comment>

in your stylesheet. Then you'll know which XSLT processor you are
actually using. It's surprising how often people think they are using
Xalan and are actually using Saxon, or vice versa.

  My
> question probably shouldn't be posted here, but I'll
> ask it anyways:  Is there any concrete implementation
> of the org.w3c.dom.Document class available in
> jdk1.4.1?

Yes, I think so. And you shouldn't need to know what it is: just use the
DocumentBuilderFactory interface in JAXP to create an instance.

But note, if you are constructing trees for use with XSLT
transformations, then the tree model used internally by the XSLT
processor is usually much more efficient than a general-purpose DOM.

Michael Kay


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