Re: Hiding the XSL ?

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman at CraneSoftwrights dot com>]

At 00/08/17 17:38 +0100, ciaran byrne wrote:
>         Is anybody aware of a way in which the
>XSL can be hidden from public view ?

During the Paris GCA XML Conference I asked the developers of Sun's XSLTC 
compiler http://www.sun.com/xml/developers/xsltc/ to implement an 
obfuscation feature that would, on invocation option, make the resulting 
translet difficult to reverse engineer.  The result of reverse engineering 
might give hints to the algorithm, but would certainly not include all of 
your rich documentation (we all include rich documentation in our 
stylesheets, right?) or self-documenting names of XSLT constructs 
(templates, variables, etc.) for others to see.

I haven't seen it yet, but hope it gets implemented.

>I would ideally like some sort of binary

Remembering that the XML used in the stylesheet is a valid input to the 
transformation process, obfuscation would defeat those stylesheets taking 
advantage of this feature.  The translet implemented in Java byte code is 
the closest I think you'll get until we see products that might compile the 
stylesheet into native binary.

I too feel very strongly there are many stylesheets and business situations 
where it makes sense to hid the contents and/or the algorithms.

................ Ken

--
G. Ken Holman                    mailto:gkholman@CraneSoftwrights.com
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