Patrice's Weblog

Yesterday we’ve released version 1.0 of Okapi, a web framework built with PHP and XSLT. I’ve spent a substantial amount of time during the last months working on that release. Okapi is the framework we use at local.ch for all our frontend needs and was originally developed by Silvan from Liip.

So far we used a heavily modified fork of Okapi. New projects at local now don’t use that internal fork anymore but instead the official central Okapi. To facilitate that I’ve merged some stuff from our fork into the main repository and also I’ve cleaned up the code base so that Okapi now sucks less.

The main features are these:

• A small routing engine (mostly inspired by Rails as all the other routing engines out there today)
• Models which provide XML representation of a diverse set of data
• XSLT views
• Configuration handling
• Internationalisation

Because of it’s good XML and XSLT support it’s ideal for SOA architectures, especially when built with REST APIs.

Development on Okapi will continue. But the idea is to add new features as extensions, so that the core can stay small.

At local.ch we’re looking for a developer in the area of PHP/XSLT development. You will take over work regarding all user-visible aspects with technologies such as PHP, XSLT or Javascript.

A job at local.ch gives you a lot of freedom to explore, find good solutions, learn new technologies, bring in your opinions and knowledge.

We want a developer who knows how to write clean XHTML and CSS, has experience in client side Javascript and is well-versed in XML. We will gladly teach you XSLT on the job but if you already know to program in XSLT so much the better.

If you’re interested, head over to our blog to read more details. You can get in contact with me via e-mail (patrice [at] local.ch) or Skype (patriceneff).

At work the templating is done with XSLT. I have the Bitflux freaks to thank for that.

Currently I'm writing a really tricky XSLT template (for me), so I was investigating a tool for getting things done quicker. And Marc Liyanage is my hero. He has written an OS X application called TestXSLT to quickly test an XSLT stylesheet against some XML file.

It accepts an XML and an XSLT file and gives you the parsed output. You can look at it in text mode, HTML mode (exactly what I need) and even XSL-FO (which I have never used).