Chapter 1. Introduction to Paperboy

1.1. What is it?

Paperboy is a system for easily manipulating XML data by applying XSLT templates to transform it into a presentable form. Although its initial—and primary—design is as a news syndication/aggregation program, by broadly generalizing the problem (for example, by allowing any XML input rather than just accepting RSS) it is very adaptable to other formating or transformation needs. Since the primary aim of the project is collecting and parsing news into more human-readable forms, the rest of this manual will focus on that topic. (Though some of the later chapters will discuss "alternative" uses of Paperboy.)