I finally had a chance to catch up with the JSP email list, and found this Model 3
discussion to be both interesting and very timely. I am currently redesigning our
architecture to include XML. We currently use JSP (.91 spec right now, but we will
upgrade when we upgrade our entire architecture). We have numerous authors
throughout our company that author and publish content using FrontPage. Overseeing
it has become more time consuming than just publishing ourselves. So our new plan
is to have them all simply author, and our Internet department will do the
publishing. We also have numerous departments that produce "content" in the way of
databases. My plan is for all this data to come to us via XML. My departments task
then, is to render the XML in a web interface. So I've been playing with XSL and
trying to determine the best method to go from XML to the user. Here are a couple
of my parameters and I'd be interested to hear your comments:
1. All data will be stored in XML, or be available in XML. As for the data in
Sybase, I will need to use SQL to get it out of Sybase, and then create XML from
it. Any suggestions?
2. I want the user to get HTML by default, but be able to request an Excel document
or a PDF document (the latter for printing, the first for manipulating the data on
their own).
3. I was going to user Java classes/packages to get the data, convert it to XML,
then pass to JSP, which will apply to the needed XSL, check security, log the use
of the page, and present the rendered HTML, Excel document, or PDF.
Any suggestions/ideas/comments would be greatly appreciated.
After reading Andrews post below. I did become concerned with the complexity of
using XSL to render all the data instead of HTML. I can see where it might be more
bloat than anything else to use XSL and in my early tests, it certainly is slower.
--
Brian N. Burridge
Internet Architect
The Internet Group
Cox Target Media
Andrew S Tomlinson wrote:
> It's interesting to hear about the broader adoption of XSL in a "Model 3".
> I was (and still am) an enthusiastic adopter of XSL but I'd like to add a
> cautionary
> note and remark that from my experience:
> 1. XSL is non-procedural and although it is incredibly easy to use for
> rudimentary
> operations it rapidly becomes very complex when anything a bit more
> sophisticated is
> required. This applies to both the features of xsl (callable templates,
> attribute sets and so on) and to the XPath syntax for matching node sets.
> 2. lack of data-type support means having to bind in java/javascript
> extension functions e.g. for date formatting
> 3. building XSL files is a radically different proposition to building HTML
> (and by extension JSP). This means that you lose the *division of labour*
> that assigns UI construction to (presumably less *technical*) Web Designers.
> Again I have found this to be the case for anything other than the most
> trivial of cases.
> 4. lack of "self-documenting" features. It's very difficult to come back to
> an XSL file after a while and figure out what some of it actually does; this
> raises the bar on expectation for clear comments by the author(s). I have
> the same "concerns" with SQL as with XPath but at least in SQL I can perform
> an EXPLAIN PLAN to see how the DBMS engine is interpreting the command. I
> would really like a similar rationalization capability in XPath.
>
> Now, on the positive I have found it great for basic forms and the
> formatting of static
> tables but, as indicated above, I rapidly hit a ceiling where the increasing
> complexity
> required for incremental functionality was prohibitive.
>
> How does this compare to others' experiences?
> Regards
> @
>
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