Xalan & Xerces on Mac OS X

For those of you attempting to install Xalan and/or Xerces on your Mac OS X, here is an excellent excerpt from a great forum response that solved literally two days worth of debugging where the "classpath" for java jars is concerned:

There is a standard place for Java jar files if you take a look in the Java Developer docs for OS X.

Simply place them either in /Library/Java/Extensions if you want them available system wide, or in ~/Library/Java/Extensions (you may have to create the folders) and it will automatically get loaded when you run java.

as far as running SimpleTransform, you need to make sure that you follow the directions given in the getting started documentation for xalan:

The Xalan-Java distribution includes a number of basic sample applications. These samples are easy to run, and you can review the source files -- all of which are brief -- to see just how they work.

To run the samples, do the following:

Set up your classpath (see above), including xalansamples.jar and (for the servlet) xalanservlet.jar.

Be sure the java executable is on your path.

Go to the samples subdirectory containing the sample (use the DOS shell if you are running Windows).

Use the java executable to run the sample from the command line.

Examine the application source and result files.

For example, go to the SimpleTransform subdirectory and issue the following command:

java SimpleTransform

The sample writes the transformation result to a file (birds.out). To see how the example works, examine the source files: birds.xml, birds.xsl, and SimpleTransform.java.

The extensions examples require additional JAR files on the classpath, and the procedure for running the sample applet and sample servlet is different. For more information about all the samples, see Xalan-Java Samples.