Transforming XML into Atom using XSLT

The Programme recordings archives feed presented don the sidebar of this website is produced by applying an XSLT on the search result dataset retrieved from archive.org to produce an Atom feed. Even though the subject matter may not be relevant to you, the process could be interesting.

Using PHP I apply an XSL transformation to the dataset in XML format retrieved by an HTTP GET request and the resulting Atom is saved in a file to be served to feed readers.

Few other details are noticable in the source codes.

Since until now PHP supports only version 1.0 of XSLT which lacks advanced functions for processing strings, I include in my transformation two such needed functions imported from the EXSLT project.

The same result could have been achieved anagrammatically by manipulating instances of the class DOMDocument and its relatives of PHP classes that represent XML documents of parts their-of. However, I, personally, prefer declarative methods to procedural ones, and I like to think that keeping as much as possible of my application in language-independent structures facilitates porting it to other languages.

On another note; the popularity of the radio drama works which I've been recording and archiving for some time seems to be more than I had anticipated, judging from the amount of sharing them that takes place on Arabic forums, and the comments I get on them.