Open source alternative to DITA Open Toolkit

Question

I'm working on a web app that will need to process DITA documents from persistent storage (likely a JCR). The DITA Open Toolkit is the only DITA implementation I'm aware of, but it requires all of your documents to exist on the filesystem. Ideally, I'd like something that works like the DITA OT, but allows you to provide a resolver (much like an XSLT URIResolver) to pull referenced content from other sources.

If people have other ideas, such as using a virtual filesystem to trick the DITA OT into working, I'd love to hear those too. Thanks!

Edit: I forgot to mention in the original post that I'm looking for an open-source solution, as this is for a project released under the Educational Community License.

Answer 1

After some evaluation, the newest version of the XMLMind Dita Converter (ditac) is really up to the job. Performance is at least double that of the Open Toolkit for building identical projects: http://www.xmlmind.com/ditac/

Answer 2

One thing to note about XMLMind Dita Converter (ditac) is that it's released under the Mozilla Public License, which according to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#GPLIncompatibleLicenses is not compatible with GPL.

Answer 3

Look at Arbortext (specifically Arbortext Content Manager). Arbortext supports xinclude, catalog files, and it also has a production-ready PDF and digital media publishing tool that you don't get with the OTK. The OTK isn't really meant to be for production.

Yes, I'm a vendor (now), but I started as an implementer more than a decade ago. I answer a lot of community questions and sponsor two dozen resources for getting people's questions answered. The best of which is the SF Bay PTC Arbortext User Group (Virtual).

Are you looking to do something like what Juniper is doing? (I can only post one link, so it's going to be mine..) go to juniper dot net, choose support, technical documentation, ex-series platforms, any of the ex series docs. They're showing topics on the web directly (it's also inside the source code on the router and in the pdf books). It would help if I understood what you're trying to do.

Feel free to reach out to me offline.

Answer 4

This new set of DITA XProc pipelines on the EMC Developer Network might be worth looking into. It can be downloaded free for development (and there's an XProc engine there as well).

This package appeared at the end of October 2010. Quote: "The aim of the project is to provide an alternative to the DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) that does not rely on file system-based processing, has no direct dependency on Java and Ant, and makes use of the XML processing capabilities of XProc to offer greater flexibility, extensibility, portability, and ultimately also better performance. The pipelines use standard XProc features as much as possible, so with little or no effort, users should be able to use them with any compliant XProc implementation. The pipelines have been tested with EMC Documentum XProc Engine (Calumet) version 1.0.12."

Answer 5

My coworker just talk to me about DITA Compiler. Apparently it's part of xml mind. According to him, the implementation isn't quite complete.

Answer 6

Maybe DITA2Go can help:

http://www.dita2go.com/

DITA2Go allows your files to be anyplace you please, as you requested. It also has numerous extensions beyond what the OT provides, such as scoped keydefs and ditavals, which are under consideration for DITA 1.3. It was created with intense collaboration of two TC members working on major live projects, and is used by hundreds of people currently. It is also about ten times as fast as the OT, thanks to C++, and requires no programming skills at all to use.

It is free, but it is not Open Source. It is fully supported and the developers fix bugs immediately and often add new features in a day or two on request. It shares a large part of its code with a commercial product, Mif2Go, which is the tool used by about 25% of FrameMaker users who are moving to DITA, according to a recent survey.

I don't see a requirement for the tools used to create a freely-licensed document to be Open Source themselves. There are absolutely no restrictions on use of the output, which obviously belongs to the user, not to Omni Systems.

HTH!