Tag Archive for cross platform

java.net.MalformedURLException: unknown protocol: j

I know that that there better things to call a blog post than to use part of an error message that I got from Saxonica‘s Saxon while I was converting XML files into PHP equivalents for the visitor information section of my main website. I use the open source Saxon-B rather than the commercial Saxon-SA and it fulfils all of my needs and version 8 and later (it has now reached 9.0.0.2) handle the XSLT 2.0 features that I need to make the transformations really clever. Also, because Saxon is available as a jar file, it is cross platform so long as you have Java on board. There are, however, some slight differences in behaviour. I now run thte thing in Linux and any Windows-style file locations are not recognised. I had the file path in a DTD declaration starting with "J:\" and that was thought to be a protocol like file, http, https, ftp and so on because of the colon. There’s no j protocol so Java gets confused and, voilà!, you get the rather obscure error that titles this post. Otherwise, the migration of the Perl script that creates XSLT files and fires off the required XML to PHP transformations was a fairly straightforward exercise once file locations and shebang line were set right.

New FileZilla

I must admit that the release of FileZilla 3 passed me by until recently. From the user interface point of view, the changes don’t look too radical but it is now cross platform, a bonus for Linux and Mac users. It can also co-exist with FileZilla 2 for those Windows users needing features from that offering that aren’t yet available in FileZilla 3. That does pose the question: why upgrade when what you have works just as well? it just as well that transferring settings is as easy as importing the FileZilla 2 settings into its successor is as easy as importing an XML file: in version 3, go to Edit, then Import… on the menus and pick up the FileZilla.xml file from the installation directory for version 2. You might get some warnings and I certainly did but the FTP sites that I had set up already came over intact.

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