Cocoon lite / XML and XSLT publishing framework

Question

What publishing frameworks (publishing only, NOT full-blown CMS) based on XML, XSLT sitemaps and pipelines exist, are stable, active, and simpler / lighter than Cocoon?

I have glanced at:

• mod_xslt (http://www.mod-xslt2.com/) which seemed to be exactly that, but looks all but dead, and required a complex setup, and apparently supported only libxslt as an XSLT processor (I'd like to be able to use Saxon and XSLT 2.0 of course).

• Apache Forrest (http://forrest.apache.org/), but I don't understand if it is really simpler than Cocoon or is rather an additionnal thing on top of Cocoon?

What I'm looking for is something that does just this:

• recieves an HTTP GET
• "runs it" through a sitemap
• finds a pipeline: source.xml -> xslt1.xsl -> xslt2.xsl -> xsltn.xsl -> serialize
• runs the pipeline
• serves the serialized result to the client

and:

• uses Saxon (or is "processor independant")
• can be installed "lightly", that is: should not require much more configuration than the sitemap

Maybe I'm describing an early version of Cocoon, or a future version of an XProc implementation...

Anyway, does such a tool exist?

Answer 1

some people argue that what has been done with cocoon 8 or 10 years ago is now best done with REST. (search for REST or restful with goolge)

in combination with XProc, its very powerful but can be light as well. I think calabash ist the best option for XProc, but there are others. (One example is maybe existdb, but that's probably not lightweight.)

for a very small project it might be overkill, though. but you can always use XProc and REST in later projects.

What you describe can be done with java, python or perl alone. (lightweight but not a framework...)

Answer 2

It might be worth taking a look at Servlex ( http://code.google.com/p/servlex/) by Florent Georges. There is unfortunately only little documentation ( http://expath.org/wiki/Saxon:Webapp), but his presentation at XML Prague 2011 ( http://www.xmlprague.cz/2011/presentations/florent-georges-servlex.pdf) covers pretty much all you might want to know about it. Look at the Dispatcher slides (somewhere in the middle) to see how request uris are translated to actions in servlex.

Answer 3

XProc. New engine at

https://community.emc.com/community/edn/xmltech

Answer 4

Take a look at ReXSL. It's not as sophisticated as Cocoon, but it simplifies the process of converting XML to HTML through XSL/XSLT. And it's an MVC framework.