Hi, initially I thought struts would be the answer to our web design needs, but then we decided how strongly it was tied to JSP. We are now using a primive framework which is somewhat inspired by struts, but much more simpleminded, which uses XSL as a renderer. We have a central servlet which first dispatches requests to certain XML generating classes and then gives that XML to a stylesheet processor. Our framework is more lightweight than cocoon and also adresses problems like parameters, form handling, things I did not find in Cocoon when I looked at it long time ago. * XSL is definately slower than JSP yet, though we use SAX Events as communication within the application. But its getting better and better and you can do quite a few tricks with caching. * If XML data comes in, the Java programming often can be very easy filtering. * Work separation between design and programming is very clear. You just give the designers a bunch of XMLs (or even a DTD/Schema) and say, try to render this. If he needs other information he has to ask the programmer for more xml. In JSP it is bad style but easily possible to include more and more code in your design. * Training to the actual designer wasn't to hard here, since they were all used to HTML sourcecode hacking. The next Servlet API seems to adress this problem differently by allowing any outputs interposed by appropriate filters. A merger between Struts and a more direct XSL application would be an interesting technology. Just thoughts, Frank
