Is there any online XSLT processing service available?

Question

(This might not seem strictly programming related, but I figure it's about deployment of an XSLT solution, and XSLT is a programming language, right?)

I have this cunning plan for customizing a podcast that I subscribe to so the titles and other parts of the feed fit more to my liking. I figure I can devise some XSLT that expects the original podcast XML as input and puts out the XML I want. Now I guess I could run some local web server and have iTunes/whatever subscribe to http://localhost/my_processor?orig=origpodcasturl&xsl=myxslthingy.

My hope is that somewhere out there exists a server that does this already, i.e. a web service accessible by a simple URL that specifies a source XML document and some XSLT to apply to it. Does anyone know if this is the case?

Answer 1

I'm not sure how iTunes would go with it, but web browsers themselves parse XSLT files. Check out the World of Warcraft site and look at the source code to see what I mean.

You just need to link to the stylesheet like this:

<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="myStylesheet.xsl"?>

Answer 2

Look into Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/).

From the site:

About Pipes

Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Like Unix pipes, simple commands can be combined together to create output that meets your needs:

• combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it.
• geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map.
• power widgets/badges on your web site.
• grab the output of any Pipes as RSS,JSON, KML, and other formats.

Answer 3

Yes, read about Amazon's Web Services and XSLT. I have not tried it myself so you'll have to read and try it.

Any such public service, in order to prevent intentional or unintentional DOS attacks is bound to have a number of restrictions, such as forbidding the use of at least some, if not all, possible extension functions, size of input and output, maximum memory used during transformation and maximum time to complete the transformation. Access to the local file system will be limited or not allowed at all. Use of the document() function, DTDs and entities in particular may be forbidden.

Also, expect it to be generally slow.

Another thing to be aware is any such service may cease to be offered at any time.

To summarize, most probably the efficiency, reliability and availability of any such service may not be up to high standards.

Answer 4

If you manage to get the content of your source and stylesheet into post url somehow(e.g. via the previously mentioned yahoo pipes) you could use this http://www.futurelab.ch/en/xslt_demo.html

Answer 5

Use the Online XSLT 2.0 Service from W3C: http://www.w3.org/2005/08/online_xslt/. That's exactly what you want.

Answer 6

Besides the already mentioned XSLT 2.0 service, there's also the W3C XSLT 1.0 service:

W3C maintains this for their own use, it is available for public use (see conditions) but without warranty. This service is provided for interactive use by individuals only.