I updated to the new Java release on OS X today, and it broke my use of XSLT in Java. From what I’ve read, J2SE 5.0 no longer sets the system property that tells JAXP which TransformerFactory to use. This, of course, seems kind of silly. I’m sure there’s some long, drawn out explanation of why: the upshot is that shit don’t work for me.
To get around this, you have to pass in the following system property to all your Java processes that are going to be running XSLT:
-Djavax.xml.transform.TransformerFactory=com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.trax.TransformerFactoryImpl
This bug report from maven has some more detail.