Pier, Smalltalk and XSLT

I'm currently investigating approaches to an update/rewrite of a
publishing system we've developed (using Rails) which takes publications
stored as Docbook XML and renders a series of webpages with navigation
according to a set of common themes switched by metadata in the source
file. Pier looks a promising candidate,  either on Squeak or Gemstone/S,
but I get the impression that Smalltalk XSLT libraries are fairly scant.
Is this right? I guess there would be the approach of calling out via a
web service or FFI to other libraries, but any advice would be appreciated.

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Dear Steve

Steve Lloyd <[hidden email]> hat am 9. Oktober 2008 um 15:38 geschrieben:

> I'm currently investigating approaches to an update/rewrite of a
> publishing system we've developed (using Rails) which takes publications
> stored as Docbook XML and renders a series of webpages with navigation
> according to a set of common themes switched by metadata in the source
> file.Pier looks a promising candidate,  either on Squeak or Gemstone/S,
> but I get the impression that Smalltalk XSLT libraries are fairly scant.
> Is this right? I guess there would be the approach of calling out via a
> web service or FFI to other libraries, but any advice would be appreciated.
>
I assume that you currently use a collection of XSLT style sheets to format your XML documents to XHTML (and maybe other formats).

The approach in Seaside is that you generate the HTML in the 'renderContentOn:' method. (See http://www.seaside.st/documentation/generating-html). You create components, every component has its own 'renderContentOn:' method. You than put the components together.

This approach bypasses the need for XSLT. One can say that Smalltalk is used as the "Formatting language". This might or might not be what you want to go for. However quite a number of people like this idea.

Regards

Hannes Hirzel


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2008/10/9, Steve Lloyd <[hidden email]>:
> I'm currently investigating approaches to an update/rewrite of a
> publishing system we've developed (using Rails) which takes publications
> stored as Docbook XML and renders a series of webpages with navigation
> according to a set of common themes switched by metadata in the source
> file. Pier looks a promising candidate,  either on Squeak or Gemstone/S,
> but I get the impression that Smalltalk XSLT libraries are fairly scant.
> Is this right? I guess there would be the approach of calling out via a
> web service or FFI to other libraries, but any advice would be appreciated.

You could also call xsltproc from the command line. This is probably
the easiest way to go on Squeak, you can use OSProcess. However on
GemStone this is problematic as well as FFI (it's supposed to be
changed with version 3.0). So if you go for GemStone you'd probably do
a web service.

Cheers
Philippe

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