I agree that XSLT with large documents in intensively memory hungry.
Unless you cache the content result or have a large parts of content
that share redundant sub parts then it is big requirement on the
final production system.
The other end of the scale is XSLT with smaller syndication sites.
I am talking about the Rich Site Summary and other portal sites
like My Netscape Netcenter, Meerkat and Radio Userland where you can
efficient use an XSLT to transform an RSS file in real time.
The other toolkit to use other than SAX or DOM is JDOM.
JDOM is pretty easy to use and you could write a hard core
XML to HTML transformation. inJjava
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Peter Pilgrim | | ++44 (0)207-545-9923
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_____________________________Cafe_Savannah,_San Antonio,Ibiza__
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From: "Matthew O'Haire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 03/10/2001 09:51 ZE10
Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
cc:
Subject: RE: Struts MVC Framework Vs. XSLT Tranformation for Web UI Handli ng
A project I worked on recently used a Servlet/XML/XSLT design, where XML data was
retrieved from and EJB session layer and transformed into HTML using dynamically
generated XSL sheets (the customer could choose which elements they wanted in their
view... the combinations of selections allowed the XSL to be dynamically generated).
Very sweet.
Unfortunately it suffered from memory issues as some of the content was quite large
(300K+). Holding the XML DOM in memory and performing the XSLT all consumed a huge
amount of RAM... it would work O.K. with a few users but clearly was going to have
scalability issues. The speed of the XSL translation was also pretty dismal.
Time constraints made us switch to a more straight forward servlet design...
Things may have improved since this project (about 1.5 years ago) in terms of memory
and performance. We didn't look at using SAX or anything else in that arena...
In hindsight I still think that the XSL stylesheet is just an extension of
presentation code. I don't know many HTML/Creative types that know how to write
XSL... I'd guess that most of the time it will be technical people who write the
XSL... if that's the case, then why not use the language we know best, Java. You can
write a "transformer/producer" class in Java for any given XML and output (HTML, XML,
etc).
Everything we wanted to achive can be done with Struts/JSP and some other things like
Tiles, and some "home grown" custom tags. In the end we looked at the skills that we
had available and decided (on our next major project) to go the Struts route... and it
was a much more sucessful project.
Maybe you'll have more sucess with XSLT, and I wouldn't rule it out, certainly in
areas where it is a good fit. If I was to use that technology again, I'd find the
bits that fit best (i.e. generating page segements) and mix the whole lot with
Struts...
Anyhow, good luck.
Matto.
-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Baldwin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 02:48
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Struts MVC Framework Vs. XSLT Tranformation for Web UI
Handling
Interesting. We're actually considering prototyping a solution that uses a bit
of both.
I'm thinking about using the MVC framework of Struts to implement application
flow control, using stateless EJB to provide services and using JSP or a servlet
to transform the resultant value objects into a nice DOM tree which I'd then
pass off to a XSLT Processor to do the final work.
I know that a lot of value of struts is in the tag libraries
(internationalization, validation, etc.) but I still don't like the way that
JSPs windup looking like something that a programmer would have to modify,
rather than a web designer. I think XSLT gets us a little bit closer to an end
goal of separating presentation from content.
How do other people feel about this?
Has anyone here looked at Cocoon functionality? I'd be interested in hearing
your thoughts.
--Michael
Minh Tran wrote:
> I'm pretty new to struts.. so I would appreciate if anyone can share their
> experiences with Struts and XSLT Transformation for the Web UI generation.
> I am starting a project pretty soon.. and the project lead is pushing to do
> a Servlet-XSLT model where XML + XSL will be transformed to HTML for the UI.
> I am currently pushing for Struts.. but I need some more ammo so that I can
> push struts as the framework for us.
>
> Thanks,
> Minh Tran
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