Origins

The Origins of SLAX

SLAX was originally developed as part of the Juniper Networks' JUNOS Operating System. It is used for on-box scripting to allow users to customize and enhance the CLI.

• Configuration data can be restricted by adding rules to the configuration checkout process
• Configuration data can be expanded using macro-like facilities
• New CLI commands can be added to perform custom diagnosis, display, or task-oriented operations
• Scripts can be triggered by events within the system, to respond automatically to problems as they occur

Our customers were unhappy with the XSLT syntax and wanted something simpler and more readable. With SLAX, we were able to give them that, and are now happy to be able to share this as an open-source project.

libslax is written in C, and is built on top of Daniel Veillard's most excellent libxml2 and libxslt libraries (for which I give massive thanks!!) libslax is implemented as an alternate parser on top of libxml2 and libxslt, using the xsltSetLoaderFunc() hook. The library must be explicitly enabled using the slaxEnable() call. See Embedding for more information about embedding the SLAX parser in another program.

libslax includes the "slaxproc" command, which is used to run scripts, as well as convert between SLAX and XSLT. See slaxproc for information about the slaxproc utility.