Doing HTTP/POST from XSLT is fun!

my final contribution of new stuff today is that I have code, which
I am willing to share, that allows you to perform HTTP/POST requests
from within XSLT. This is not so strange as it may sound. You can
already do HTTP/GET requests using the document() function. But I
am using XSLT to do web-services, and so I want to call web services
from within an XSLT script. Here is an example:

<post:message url="...">
  <post:with-param name="SOAPAction" select="..."/>
  ...
</post:message>

post:message is of course done in analogy to xsl:message, mixing
in code from the document() implementation and the look and feel
of XSL parameters with post:with-param (that of course sets HTTP
request-parameters instead of XSLT-internal names.)

Of course since communications includes the possibility for
error (even the XSLT standard function document() does!), you
really want my exception handling package to go with this one
(guess why I wrote it ;-).

This is real fun to use XSLT as a platform for all XML related
work. Forget those super nifty SOAP APIs and of course forget
JSP. All you need is XSLT!

Once again, if you'd like this code (which exists for Saxon
versions 6 and 7) please respond in public (I want the show of
hands.) My preference is to make this code part of something
bigger out there rather than dragging along my little pieces.

regards,
-Gunther

--
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org