Offloading XSLT Processing to ZXTM
XSLT processing by ZXTM is another example of offloading specific tasks to an application specifically optimized for the job. Even if you don't use XML to exchange data between applications today, it is inevitable that you will, given the reliance application vendors have on XML already. The problem is that each application will speak its own dialect of XML; each are compatible, but require translation.
Through XSLT, TrafficScript acts as the translator between applications speaking different dialects of XML. This means that you only have to translate in one place, not many. ZXTM is XML-ready. When you start using XML-enabled applications, you will be able to increase their ROI immediately by offloading XSLT processing to ZXTM
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What is XSLT?
Another prevalent requirement is the ability for one application to share data with another, requiring the translation of one dialect of XML into another via the open standard mechanism called Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). The power of XSLT is that it enables otherwise unrelated applications, both communicating in their own dialect of XML, to share information.
How can I make use of XSLT?
It is possible, for example, for an XML-based online purchasing system to send or retrieve information from an XML-enabled Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system backed by an XML-enabled database, and these systems could be communicating either over a corporate Local Area Network, or between separate companies over the wider Internet.
In a similar way to specialist devices which can perform SSL decryption on behalf of the other servers on the network, ZXTM can take the processing burden of XSLT away from the application servers. This will free up the application servers to perform their specialist tasks, resulting in enhanced performance, response times, and return on existing deployed application server infrastructure.
Can you give me other examples of where XSLT is useful?
Amongst other things, XSLT can solve the following real-world problems:
- Wrapper Removal: many B2B applications process XML documents and add a wrapper before forwarding them on to another unit; XPath (see our ZXTM page on XML) can be used to process wrappers, and XSLT can be used to remove them if required.
- Document Optimization: XSLT can be used to reduce the size of an XML document by removing redundant nodes. This then leads to efficiencies on the back-end application server. Again, XPath may be used to examine the redundant nodes before the document is reduced using XSLT if required.
- Document Normalization: a hard-coded XPath query in a legacy back-end application may require XML documents to conform to a particular DTD; XSLT can normalize the documents, that is, convert them to an XML document that conforms to the required DTD.
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