Mr. XML Publisher provides a Java web-app interface to server-side XML processing capabilities and exposes those capabilities as XML formatting services. It centralizes on a server the executables and config files that would otherwise exist on the desktop machines of many writers.

Mr. XML Publisher accepts uploaded XML projects and returns formatted output. Formatting is done with XSL in XML processing "pipelines" defined by an administrator. Each format offered is produced by a different processing sequence wherein the output of an XML processing tool is subsequently used as the input of another XML processing tool. The XML tools are "chained" together. Mr. XML Publisher depends on the executables in the tool chains and runs each command as an external subprocess in a JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Users are effectively provided the equivalent of formatting their XML projects from within a shell on the server, but the users have no shells and they cannot run any commands; they can only upload and format their projects.

In most cases, a format's tool-chain can be very simple, including as few as one, two, or three commands. However, if necessary, Mr. XML Publisher can accommodate XML processing defined in any number of commands or in complex pipelines as might be defined in shell scripts, ant scripts, or Makefiles. Administrators with advanced XML skill sets can even deploy Mr. XML Publisher as a networked server formatting uploaded XML using XProc pipelines (http://www.w3.org/TR/xproc/) executed with applications such as Calabash (http://xmlcalabash.com/). XProc pipelines, scripts, native executables, java apps, Makefiles, whatever, all are run as external subprocesses within a JVM under the supervision of Mr. XML Publisher.

Because Mr. XML Publisher is a multi-threaded application, and because web containers and JEE servers are also multi-threaded, the volume of formatted output you can achieve with Mr. XML Publisher is very high. On a properly configured, somewhat older, low-end server, Mr. XML Publisher can format approximately 500,000 pages per day.^[1] Maximum output increases almost linearly with the addition of CPUs or CPU cores.

This document, the Mr. XML Publisher Administration Guide, describes how you install and configure Mr. XML Publisher. It is intended for people familiar with administering Java web applications in a web container or JEE application server. Likewise, the hints, tips, and instructions it provides for customizing the default Mr. XML Publisher user interface are intended for those familiar with HTML, CSS, Java applets, JSPs, JavaScript, and related web technologies.