XSLT

Chapter 9. Case Study: The Toot-O-Matic

In this chapter, we’ll examine a tutorial-building tool called the Toot-O-Matic. Developed by yours truly for IBM’s developerWorks web site (http://www.ibm.com/developerWorks, check your local listings), it’s a good example of how stylesheets can drive a sophisticated publishing system for structured information. Our tool is built around the Xalan XSLT processor, the Apache XML Project’s FOP tool, and various Java facilities (such as the JPEGCodec class).

About the Toot-O-Matic

Tutorials are the most popular kind of content at developerWorks. Unfortunately, in the early days of the site, we didn’t have good tools for creating tutorials. We often started with a document written in a word processor, then we printed it as a PDF file, then we converted it to an HTML file, then we broke the single HTML file into smaller pieces to represent the various panels of the tutorial. Much of this was a tedious, error-prone process that cried out for automation. The Toot-O-Matic handles most of the work necessary to generate files, allowing the tutorial author and production staff to focus on more important things.

To publish a tutorial, we need to create several kinds of output:

• A web of interlinked HTML files. There should be an introductory panel for the tutorial. It should contain links to all sections of the tutorial. From each panel, there are links to the previous and next panels, as well as links to the Main menu and a section index. All ...