NiceXSL logo Contents Download Update-Site NiceXSL logo

NiceXSL Usage

NiceXSL provides a more friendly but fundamentally the same programming language as XSLT. You may therefore find it best to stick with XSLT until you are familiar with the basic XSLT constructs and XPath expressions, and can use standard text books as guides. Once you are becoming frustrated with the XML overhead, you are ready for NiceXSL.

You may migrate an existing XSLT script to NiceXSL by using the XSL2NiceXSL.xsl script. This produces reasonably formatted NiceXSL, but you may well be able to sharpen up some of the source text. The script should run with any XSLT 1.0 or 2.0 processor. The author has used it with Xalan and Saxon 7.

Once you have NiceXSL sources, you maintain them and translate them to XSLT in order to execute them. You use an entry point in nicexsl.jar appropriate to your environment.

See Command Line Usage, ANT Usage or Eclipse Usage.

You may find a very brief example of NiceXSL in the Overview

The XSL2NiceXSL.xsl stylesheet that reverse engineers XSLT stylesheet into NiceXSL provides a much more substantial example. This code supports pretty printing with a variety of new-line, quote and special characters and so may provide some inspiration for those struggling with accurate text formatting. This stylesheet is generated from XSL2NiceXSL.nxsl.