Re: [xslt] Compiling stylesheets

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Mon, Aug 06, 2001 at 01:59:48PM +0200, Bernhard Zwischenbrugger wrote:
> Is it possible to compile stylesheets?
> 
> The thing I wan't to do is:
> 
> #> compilestylesheet test.xsl > compiledStylesheet.exe
> Questions
> ========
> Is this possible with libxslt?

  No. Generating binaries is by definition unportable. libxslt is not
tied to an architecture/binary file format.

> What to do with compiled stylesheets
> ==========================
> 
> A realy usefull thing would be to make a fastcgi modul
> for apache from a single stylesheet.

  Useless. stylesheets are compiled internally, and and this
internal form can be reused for multiple transformations. I assume
people provising server side solutions uses this. This is available
at the API level and from the command line if you do

  xsltproc stylesheet input1 input2 ... inputn

  In practice launching a .EXE (or other binary form) is likely
to be more expensive than compiling a stylesheet on the fly.

> To make the thing perfect, caching results is always a good thing.

  Completely independant, the caching of the result or sources
should not be tied directly to the XSLt engine.

> Licence
> ======
> Is it allowed to sell compiled stylesheets, without deliver the 
> xslt-stylesheet source?

  The question has no basis for libxslt since there is no compilation
in a binary format

> What does LGPL say about that?

  Nothing. You can process proprietary data with a tool based on GPL
or LGPL software. The W3C IPR like licence of libxslt doesn't care either.
(Remember that libxslt is available under 2 licences check the Copyright
and the IPR files in the distribution)

Daniel

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