Saxon

The ability to save and reload a stylesheet using Java serialisation (i.e PreparedStylesheet.loadCompiledStylesheet) was dropped in Saxon 9.4, released in December 2011. The modern replacement is the ability to export to a SEF file.

In the old mechanism, the saved format was very closely tied to Saxon internal classes and properties, so in general it wasn't possible to save a stylesheet under one Saxon release, and reload it under a later release.

I'm afraid there's no reverse compiler, so if you've lost the XSLT source code I don't think there's any practical way of recovering it.

Thank you.

Is there a documentation page about generating/loading SEF file?

After some more digging I found actual stylesheets and they were being built using net.sf.saxon.Compile in ant job. I presume generating SEF file will be similar?

You can generate SEF files either using the -export option on the Transform command line (plus -nogo if you don't want to execute), or using methods in the s9api API.

"Exporting a stylesheet requires Saxon-EE" I presume there is no third way to achieve what I am doing?

The third way is simply to recompile the stylesheet each time. It's not actually that much more expensive than reloading it from a SEF file.

Yes, but that means we either loose encryption we had on PreparedStylesheet, or have to make something really complex to encrypt whole folder of stylesheets to load them later.

I'd call it obfuscation rather than encryption - but yes, its true that both the old and new methods of precompiling stylesheets have benefits in protecting your IP as well as performance considerations.

Sorry if the feature is valuable to you but not valuable enough to justify the cost of an EE license. Remember you only need an EE license to generate a SEF file, not to load one.