Unexpected success. (Forgive me in advance if this if off topic) I have been attempting to reproduce the examples in Nicholas Chase's book on XML and Java from Scratch and additionally get the samples in xalan-j_2_1_0 to execute. I downloaded Sun's J2EE and got it running on Win2KPro. "Deploytool" was far more difficult than "ant" with xml scripts, but I was still learning EARs and WARs. Nothing worked. I kept getting errors and private email to various experts left me wondering how to proceed. Finally, in desperation, I made one last attempt with deploytool. I added eight of the bin/[].jar files and then added samples/servlet/jspSample.jsp as a Web Component with an alias of /sample so that I could get to the jsp. Still the transformer.transform(source, result) generated 10 pages of traceback. I remembered some comment about "absolute" path so in the suggested jsp invocation, I flat out guessed. I copied the todo.xml and todo.xsl to the top/root of my "C" directory. I then used the following URL: http://localhost:8000/Xalan/sample/xxx!&XML=todo.xml&XSL=todo.xsl To my utter astonishment, I got a new error. This one was similar to the ones I got when I had attempted to use Mr. Chase's servlet code. The complaint was SystemID: file:///C://todo.xml; Line#1: 1; Column#: -1 ... "Malformed UTF-8 char -- in a Tomcat Exception Report. Using information from http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_encoding.asp I saved my file as Unicode and unexpected success. Catalina, valves, jasper, jsp and Xalan. My children think I speak Klingon. Diane
