The stylesheets and extensions that make up the Toot-O-Matic exercise almost everything in XSLT and XPath. Best of all, it allows us to take the structured content of an XML document and transform it into dozens of HTML, JPEG, PDF, and zip files, all of which are extensively cross-referenced and hyperlinked. Even though developerWorks doesn’t actually publish the XML file itself (the XML file never leaves our server), using XML for this purpose saves us a tremendous amount of time and money. If you’ve got a project that needs to convert structured data into several different kinds of documents, an XSLT-based solution can be a winner.

If you’d like to look at the source code for the Toot-O-Matic, it’s available at http://www6.software.ibm.com/dl/devworks/dw-tootomatic-p. Even if you’re not writing tutorials, there are a number of useful techniques in the code that you’re welcome to use in your own projects. The developerWorks site also has articles and a discussion forum related to the Toot-O-Matic code.