A White Paper re a product from a company called C24 Solutions was posted on TheServerSide a few days back. The product is called "Integrated Objects" and basically what it is a tool that allows you "read a message as CSV, XML, fixed length, SWIFT, etc. and execute an XQuery or XSL transform on it without having to convert it to XML.".

I made an attempt to give both Smooks and JBoss ESB a little plug. For anyone that's interested, here's a link to the thread.