Another thing I do for developerWorks is create tools that actually use all the technologies we espouse. So far, our tutorial builder is the only thing we've open-sourced:
Tools
The Toot-O-Matic [Overview article | tutorial | forum]
August 2001 This is our tutorial builder. It's basically a single XSLT stylesheet that invokes a number of other stylesheets and extension functions to build a complete tutorial from a single XML file. Your XML source is converted into a web of hyperlinked HTML documents, a number of JPEG files, a PDF file, and a ZIP file that contains everything you need to view the tutorial on your machine. This is a really good example of what XSLT can do. The tool has saved dW a significant amount of time and money, and has greatly reduced the time it takes us to publish a tutorial.
I'm really pleased that we've been able to release the source code for the tool. I don't know how many people will want to build their own tutorials, but there are certainly a number of useful techniques in the stylesheets and extension functions. Our friends at Cape Clear Software have released a bunch of tutorials written with the tool; you can view them at www.capeclear.com/support/tutorials/capestudio/index.shtml.
When people whine that XML isn't ready for prime time because most clients don't support it, I use the Toot-O-Matic to refute that claim. Even though the XML file never leaves our server, the fact that we author a single XML file and generate several different kinds of output from it is a stirring testament to the power of XML and XSLT. Or something like that.
