DOCBOOK-APPS: Docbook/XML, done with Java

[Matt Reynolds <mreynolds@pdxinc.com>]

My apologies if this is the wrong list.  I'm new here.

Here at work, we've decided to use DocBook for our internal
documentation.  It appears to do everything we need, and we've started
creating many documents already.

However, as we have varied levels of expertise, and various platforms to
support, I've been trying to produce a "program" to process documents
with DocBook through Java (I'm also a developer, and so if I need to
build any wrappers or tools, I'd prefer to do it in my "comfort zone").

As far as I can tell, since we're using DocBook XSL, I should be able to
simply use the appropriate stylesheets and process them against the XML
documents we have.  (Is this correct?)

So far, I've tried using Ant 1.4.1 with Xerces/Xalan (whatever the
latest ver is off of xml.apache.org) and the DocBook-XSL (from
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/docbook/docbook-xsl-1.50.1-EXP.tar.gz
).  Currently, I'm getting "strange" errors processing documents with
Xalan (which I'll be taking up with those folks shortly, the output is
cryptic and terse, which doesn't help me much).

Regardless, I'm curious to know if anyone else out there is using an all
Java setup?  Do you have any suggestions for me to try?  My goal is to
process our DocBook XML with an automatable Java tool.

Also, just because I'm new to DocBook in general, how many of you are
using DocBook XML?  I've been having difficulty using the SGML tools
packaged with Debian when processing DocBook XML.  How popular is the
XML side of DocBook?  What tools do you use?  Reference material?

I just want an automated process, dang it :)

Anyway, any and all help is appreciated.

Thanks,
Matt Reynolds