Juniper's XML management interface foundation allows interaction with the operating system in a disciplined and structured way, which is ideal for machine-to-machine interfaces and automation applications. Working with XML, however, can be a challenge. Yes, it's structured and regular. Yes, it supports schemas that define the structure, but when you have to manipulate data objects represented as XML, you need a way of expressing data transformations.
The industry standard way to express the transformation of XML-formatted data is Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT). It is commonly used in web applications for transforming structured XML data into presentable HTML web pages or similar.
Since the configuration state and operational state of JUNOS can be represented as XML, using XSLT to represent requests and changes to internal states is...