Cocoatron 1.0 Beta 1 Released

Cocoatron.com

Cocoatron is a collection of Automator Actions that allows you to visually create XML Processing Pipelines.

Implemented using libxml2, libxslt, libexslt, and NSXML, Cocoatron suppors DTD, W3C XML Schema, RELAX NG, XSLT 1.0, XQuery, and XInclude.

Cocoatron consists of six Automator Actions (pipeline stages):

1. Load XML Documents
2. Process XIncludes of XML Documents
3. Validate XML Documents (DTD, XSD, RNG)
4. Transform XML Documents (XSLT)
5. Query XML Documents (XQuery)
6. Serialize XML Documents

Inspired by XProc and SXPipe, Cocoatron is a simple way to create XML pipelines without writing a line of custom ‘glue’ code in Java, C++ or other languages.

Much like SXPipe, these actions deal strictly with XML Infosets. Under the hood, the XML Infosets created and returned by Cocoatron Actions are actually libxml2 xmlDocPtr structs contained in Cocoa object wrappers. An Infoset is constructed using Load XML Documents and serialized back to text using Serialize XML Documents. To create pipleines, place other, built-in Apple Actions before and after these two such as Get Specified Finder Items or New TextEdit Document.

Note this is a beta release ;). There is a known bug when using Load XML Documents to load documents at remote URLs using Get Specified URLs. Currently, I’m thinking this is an Automator bug, but I’m still investigating. Meanwhile, you can load local XML Documents using Get Specified Finder Items.

Check it out and report bugs! Nite, nite.