Category: Web Apps
Another cool project that I’ve let gather dust is Thoth. Thoth is a web server that uses XSLT as it’s scripting language much like Coldfusion, ASP, or Cocoon.
One of the things that makes Thoth cool is that the request is turned into XML before it gets to the handling page. This makes the request far easier to deal with, save, or query (at least from an XML and XSLT standpoint).
I even ported the Mach-ii framework to XSLT for Thoth (renamed to Machina) so there is a logical way to build apps.
This could be a great middleware product as it’s totally XML focused. It takes in, saves, transforms, and sends XML. It could be used, for example, as a proxy service for web services / raw xml to transform different inputs to a single standard.
But the coolest feature is you can make PDFs using FOP on the fly. This isn’t as easy as CFMX’s <cfdocument> tag, but the level of control you have using FOP (and SVG) is pretty intense. And you only have to make a template one time - from then on you just change the XML input.
That picture is of an HTML rendered page, a PDF rendered page, and a bit of what the code looks like on the right. The only bad thing is it’s not a servlet, I wrote the whole server from the ground up, but the Thoth service’s structure is very close to a servlet so porting should be easy.
Seeing how Adobe’s Document Server is a pretty penny it seems like there is a market for this. I wonder if I should revive this project… what do you think?