> .......
> XSLT is not perfect - neither is HTTP or HTML or any other standard. But
> because Apache and many other organizations are implementing and using it
> - I think they'll be around for a while :-)
>
> Costin
Costin,
You are still missing the point (as I wrote in my previous post on this
thread) of the big volume of jars XSLT use would add to Tomcat minimal
distro for JSP compilation.
Also, maybe the impact of using XSLT is quite larger than you expect.
Especially via the huge memory demands and respective side effects. I
know that you know well about the impact of creating a zillion of
objects in memory (as it happens in even the most minimal use of XSLT),
so I am not going to detail on what those side effects are.
What is worse, XSLT is usualy way too much trouble because so many
things are so counter intuitive.
The trap is that the really simple stuff works as expected, but when
you need something just a little bit more complicated, sudenly you bump
into something that does not work as expected, and you spend the next
few days trying to figure out what.
Jon is a... er... politness challenged person and is a bit too obcessed
with Velocity, but he is basically right.
I used XSLT a lot and I can tell you that is easy for Velocity to be a
better alternative (and it is not my favourite one!) just because XSLT
is such a poor template mechanism.
One year ago, I was in the XSLT-LIST, bought Michael Kay book (kind of
a very essential XSLT bible) and I was thinking about writing everything
I could in XSLT just as any other XSLT fanatic... until I found out that:
- I was wasting way too much time with XSLT complexities (why do you
think the XSLT-LIST has all that traffic? Do you know that list?);
- The outcome was always slower and more resource intensive than I
found natural (and that the alternatives, as I discovered later).
I would still use XSLT for some XML transformation tasks, but never for
templating.
I use Velocity and, in terms of both functionality and resource usage,
it would really be a much better choice than XSLT (which is not hard
to do, anyway). But it would NOT be my 1st choice for this (see my
previous posting for further detail). It would be my 2nd choice in a
very cut down version.
Notice that I was not born with this knowledge. I went trough a lot of
trouble to learn this. Now, you can
- Pay attention to what I say and chek it out;
- Think that the W3C is always right (HAHAHAHAHA!);
- Think that your intuition is always right, which is another way of
saying that you were born knowing it all.
Sorry Costin for assuming that you do not have much experience with
XSLT and its alternatives, but I just think you are too smart to keep
defending it if you had that experience.
Have fun,
Paulo Gaspar
