History

This is the 5th rewrite of a project that began in mid-2005.

Early versions of this program used Xalan-C++, but that package and its dependencies turned out to be difficult to build on various Linux and Apple OS X systems. Since a design goal for this tool was easy installation across different hardware platforms and architectures, alternatives to the C++ XSLT engines were investigated.

Generation 2 of xml-qstat programs and CGIs used the very nice Perl modules XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT. Those modules provided Perl interfaces to the Gnome Project’s excellent libxml2 and libxslt code libraries.

Generation 2 code was abandoned when Apache Cocoon was discovered – the Cocoon framework functions out-of-the-box on just about any Java-enabled system and there are no requirements to download and build various dependent XML libraries and Perl modules. The XML-based publishing framework provided by Cocoon provides additional features and capabilities not found in standalone XSLT transformation engines.

Generation 3 of xml-qstat came after Chris Dagdigian effectively abandoned the project and codebase for quite some time as his work took him in different directions. During this period, Mark Olesen made significant improvements both in cleaning up the XSLT framework as well as adding entirely new features such as support for multiple clusters.

Generation 4 of this project is essentially Mark Olesen’s fork, uploaded and imported into a new GIT repository hosted at github. We plan to use the new git repository as the base for the long-delayed 1.0 release. Chris Dagdigian is back as a contributor and the project is seeking new contributors, testers and developers.

Generation 5 of this project now includes HTTPi-xmlqstat for client-side XSLT transformations. This webserver application is very small, has very few dependencies (Perl + GridEngine) which enables it be installed on any cluster node without any extra infrastructure.