Erlxsl is one of my pet projects – it aims to provide proper xslt support for Erlang/OTP by linking to existing C/C++ based implementations at runtime. 

We started out life handing off to libxslt, but that proved problematic due to (a) thread safety concerns and (b) memory leaks that proved hard to track down. Then we moved to an implementation based on Sablotron. Making the move was easy, due to our simple “plugin” style design (little more than defining an xslt engine api as a set of ‘extern’ functions that are dynamically linked during compilation).

Now we’ve decided to go all out and use Xalan-C++ as our primary xslt provider. And still, despite all of this progress, the source code has never been published in our sourceforge based subversion repo! Why on earth not – you may well ask!? Are we being stupid and forgoing change control!?

Heaven forbid! But in fact, erlxsl is being developed for use in real world, production systems. As such, there’s a little contract negotiation going on over the terms of the licence I’ve chosen (the vanilla BSD license, in this case). Until I’ve reached an agreement with the others who’re involved, I’m not willing to release to sourceforge due to the potential legal ramifications. <sigh>

Once all that’s over, I’m looking forward to seeing this in action though. Not least because I’m keen to try out erlyweb, but don’t like it’s template views much! 😉