Alternative XSLT Engine

Different Transformer

Q: I don't have xsltproc on my system. Can I use a different XSL transformer?

A: Yes, it requires some additional configuration. We'll demonstrate it below with the free Apache Xalan XSL Engine (https://xalan.apache.org). (NOTE: Xalan seems to have a bug when referencing an external document multiple times, so libxslt-based transformers are recommended right now).

Wrap the engine

The PP projects expect that the engine be called using the xsltproc calling convension namely

command [--stringparam paramname1 paramvalue1 [--stringparam paramname2 ... ]] -o outputpath xslpath inputpath

but other engines are called with different calling conventions, so if you want to use those, you'll have to wrap them appropriately. Currently this is far from trivial.

For example, Xalan(Java) uses the following calling convention:

java [-param paramname1 paramvalue1 [ -param _paramname...]] -xsl xslpath -in input -out output

Thus the Xalan wrapper might look something like the following:

#!/bin/sh
# xalan-transform
while [ "$#" -gt 2 ]; do
    if [ "$1" == "--stringparam" ];then
	parametizer="-param $2 $3"
	shift
	shift
    elif [ "$1" == "-o" ]; then
	OUT=$2
	shift
    fi
    shift
done

java -cp /opt/xalan/xalan-j_2_7_2/xalan.jar:/opt/xalan/xalan-j_2_7_2/xercesImpl.jar org.apache.xalan.xslt.Process -param debug p $parametizer -xsl $1 -in $2 -out $OUT

You'd then put this wrapper in your path and set the XSL_EXE variable to point to the wrapper (either in an environment variable or in the makefile).

Obviously you'd still need a make utility AND, not so obvious, you still need some sort of Unix shell emulation as the paths are all formatted with Unix slashes('/').