This is the permanent status page for Calabash. Calabash is an implementation of XProc: An XML Pipeline Processor, a specification being developed by the W3C to address questions about the XML processing model. Version 0.9.17 beta is now available.

XML Calabash LogoCalabash runs XProc pipelines. It is a command-line application. This version of Calabash is supposed to implement the 5 January 2010 Working Draft version of the XProc specification.

The current release is 0.9.17 from 27 February 2010. This is a beta release.

Version 0.9.17 implements the versioning and other recent changes to XProc. It depends on Saxon 9.2. It also introduces an error listener to aid integration of XML Calabash into other products.

There have been a lot of changes since the last release, so it's possible that this version may be a little unstable. Please let me know if you encounter any problems.

This version of Calabash passes all the tests in the test suite. I assert that it passes “Test validxsd-006”, the test suite scaffolding just isn't smart enough to notice.

Recent changes:

Calabash's performance against the test suite is reported. (Most releases so far have passed most, if not quite all, of the tests.)

Calabash is implemented in Java and should run on any platform that supports Java 1.5 or later and has a command-line. You can get “calabash” from the download page on xmlcalabash.com. It is available under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2.0.

Previous releases:

Calabash is maintained by Norman Walsh. Please report any bugs that you encounter.

If you'd like to build the project yourself, you can browse the the Subersion repository or access it directly from http://svn.xmlcalabash.com/.

Calabash was first announced on 24 August 2008. It is a complete rewrite of an earlier project named simply The XML Pipeline Processor.

Comments:

There doesn't seem to be any source code at http://svn.xmlcalabash.com/

Posted by Gavin Carothers on 03 Sep 2008 @ 05:17p UTC [link]

It was there, you just couldn't see it :-) I've fixed that now.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 05 Sep 2008 @ 11:43a UTC [link]

Thanks for your work on this.

I'm going to play with it a bit this week.

Posted by Chris on 30 Sep 2008 @ 04:54p UTC [link]

The fact that you keep on adding dependancies on foreign proprietary software shows how XML has failed. Obviously step #1 of xproc support work should be to have open-source implementations of all the XML Standards needed for xproc itself available. I like the idea of xproc; I hate the idea of having to throw out hundreds, if not in sum thousands of dollars for licenses just to run the full xproc vocabulary. E.g. I have the perfect usage scenario for xproc. validate query validate transform split upload etc. Seems to start off with xproc seriously, I first gotta implement the pack of xml standards. Wake up W3C! Where are YOUR prototypes?!

Posted by Martin Weber on 27 Oct 2008 @ 05:05p UTC [link]

Martin,

The only standard steps in Calabash that require any proprietary software are p:validate-with-xml-schema and p:xsl-formatter.

In each case, it's simply a matter of expediency on my part. I will certainly support Xerces for schema validation eventually, and probably FOP for XSL formatting.

All of the other dependencies are on open source packages of one flavor or another.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 30 Oct 2008 @ 01:38p UTC [link]

Norman,

...you mean "so long as you don't try to use the two year old XPath2 / XSLT2 standards" which again forces you to have DTDs available which again .. or you go down the money route. That's what I'm talking about. Anyways, I'd like to seriously test this but with saxon as a requirement I'll probably have to hack some first. Let's see what my employer says..

Posted by Martin Weber on 04 Nov 2008 @ 06:50p UTC [link]

Martin,

There's nothing commercial about the Saxon support except for the p:validate-with-xml-schema step, which I've already explained is a question of implementation convenience, not any sort of refusal to implement an entirely free suite of steps.

Posted by Norman Walsh on 07 Nov 2008 @ 02:07a UTC [link]

Regarding XPath2 / XSLT2: do either of these requires DTDs or any other form of validation? I thought you just don't get a lot of the schema-aware goodness if you don't have validation. There are, however, lots of other reasons why these versions are a big step forward from the old ones.

By the way, is there an open-source schema-aware XSLT2 processor available? I'm fully aware of the Saxon-B/SA split.

Posted by Ed Davies on 16 Nov 2008 @ 11:52a UTC [link]

Ed,

You don't need DTDs or XML Schemas to use XPath 2.0 or XSLT 2.0. You can use DTDs, of course, and you can use XML Schema if you have a schema-aware processor. I'm not aware of any open-source, schema-aware XSLT 2.0 processors.

Personally, I stick with RELAX NG validation and don't care about schema-awareness at the XSLT level (beyond simple types that are available in a basic processor).

Posted by Norman Walsh on 17 Nov 2008 @ 02:42p UTC [link]

I appreciate the nature of this Calabash project and the W3C work. It is on a valuable track.

We've been working on a much narrower development project on a homebrew basis, but it does reflect the qualities of creating a modularized pipeline of XSLT transforms. It uses an ASP script controlling things together with MSXML objects and methods (on a Windows server obviously). It's oriented to simply grabbing static XML/HTML inputs, running a specified series of transforms, then displaying the result in a browser as XHTML, forms, slightly animated at that point by embedded Javascript (nothing fancy at all, no frills).

Our framework simply leverages naming the inputs and XSLTs on the URL http call, e.g. http://xtp.boeing.com/xtp.asp?xml=http://server/folder/foo.xml&xsl=GetHTML,Transform1,Transform2,ShowTable

Thank you Norman!

Posted by Dave Porter on 02 Dec 2008 @ 06:44p UTC [link]

What about auto-discovery of configuration.xml-like files on the classpath, akin to JAR service lookup?

This would mean that extension steps can be supported by Calabash just by dropping a JAR with the implementation and extra configuration file onto Calabash's classpath.

Such extra configuration files should probably be able to override the built-in <implementation> declarations, in order to, for instance, implement <p:xsl-formatter> with FOP.

Posted by Alex Hvostov on 17 Jan 2009 @ 00:12a UTC [link]

Can you tell me how to use p:xsl-formatter step. I am getting some errors when I use this step.

I am running calabash with the following options. -isource=out1.fo xpl\test-pdf.xpl

xep is added in the classpath.

Below is the error message:

Error : file:/C:/Sesi/personal/xml/xproc/calabash-0.9.14/calabash-0.9.14/xpl/test-pdf.xpl:2: Output port 'result' on anonymous step declare-step at file:/C:/Sesi/personal/xml/xproc/calabash-0.9.14/ca labash-0.9.14/xpl/test-pdf.xpl:2 unbound Error : Pipeline failed: err:XE0001: Output port 'result' on anonymous step declare-step at file:/C :/Sesi/personal/xml/xproc/calabash-0.9.14/calabash-0.9.14/xpl/test-pdf.xpl:2 unbound Unknown error

Posted by Sesi Bhushan on 31 Jul 2009 @ 12:22p UTC [link]
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