Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Death of XSLT in Web Frameworks | Javalobby

The Death of XSLT in Web Frameworks | Javalobby: "The interesting point is: how the XML-based processing works in practice? The short answer is: very poor. And the weakest link in the whole chain is XSLT."

These are my comments on his 5 problems with XSLT:
1. Conditionals are a pain but are they common enough to be big to be a deal-killer?
2. Creating an extra variable occasionally isn’t a big deal.
3. Can be a pain.
4. Functional programming is different but it is gaining utility if large systems
5. I don't have enough experience with this to comment.

Some quick benefits of XSLT over JSP:
1. Push processing to client.
2. Reduce data sent to client
3. Depending on the data and HTML that needs to be applied, XSLT may be the best fit (just like JSP may be the best fit in other situations).

Some time spent learning the different ways of XSLT may have improved the experience. XSLT doesn't work in all cases (what language does) but I think its a little bit premature to claim it is dead. Not even languages that "nobody uses" like COBOL, assembly, and Fortran are dead.

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