Recently at work, I’ve been using XSLT transforms in our backend quite a bit. But the issues I’ve run into took stupid amounts of effort to resolve and it wasnt easy to find any kind of list of do’s and dont’s – so I’m gonna make one from the stuff I’ve just discovered!

• When dealing with DOMSource and DOMResult – always setNamespaceAwareness(true) on your DocumentBuilder/DocumentBuilderFactory !!! – otherwise you end up with empty Documents and no indicators as to why!
• Remember that an XSLT transformation is not guaranteed to return an XML document! Hence, Don’t automatically assume a DOMResult( docBuilder.newDocument() ) will return a valid object – if your XSLT doesn’t produce valid XML, you’ll get an empty DOMResult document node!
• Validation settings affect whitespace awareness – if you don’t have validation on, whitespace is NOT ignored, so make sure your XSLT is formatted correctly – the most common problem area is when you try to prettyfy your .xsl file using indentation etc. Remember that XSL is pretty much an in-place tempate file [Copy Contents -> Replace Stuff exactly where it's asked for -> Dump result!]

Lastly, and easy way to transform input XML and pretty print it.

TransformerFactory transfac = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer trans = transfac.newTransformer();
trans.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.OMIT_XML_DECLARATION, "no");
trans.setOutputProperty(OutputKeys.INDENT, "yes");

Document doc = buildXml(); /* get your XML document from somewhere.. */

StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
StreamResult result = new StreamResult(stringWriter);
DOMSource source = new DOMSource(doc);
trans.transform(source, result);
System.out.println(stringWriter.toString());

Just because for a standard install, its really simple, but you have to read the getting started guide which has alot of info, but it’s not necessarily “to the point”, if you know what I mean.

1. Download Boost 1.36.0 and Bjam (http://www.boost.org/users/download)
2. Add Bjam to the PATH if you haven’t already
3. Navigate into where you extracted the boost code, the folder is probably named “boost_1_36_0″… e.g. cd C:\Libraries\boost_1_36_0
4. invoke bjam with the following arguments: <configuration> –toolset=msvc <output directory name>. e.g. “bjam debug –toolset=msvc stage” builds the entire boost library, and spits out debug .dll’s and .lib’s into “C:\Libraries\boost_1_36_0\stage\libs”
5. Add/update these paths in your IDE or your LIB and INCLUDE environment variables e.g. in MSVC I updated my VC include directory list to have “C:\Libraries\boost_1_36_0″ and my VC lib directory list to have “C:\Libraries\boost_1_36_0\stage\libs” 
6. in your C++ #include <boost/MODULE.hpp> and you should be good to go! (with MSVC the appropriate lib is automatically linked against, if you’re directories are all good, you shouldn’t have to modify your individual project settings)
7. Write awesome C++ code!!