On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, James Strachan wrote:
> > I think I'd prefer having XSLT operations inside a different package than
> > XPATH operations. XPATH isn't part of JAXP, so your XPATH
> > support introduces additional dependancies that aren't strictly necessary
> > for transformations (e.g. dom4j). My preference would be to work on
> > seperate tag libraries that complement one another. Is there anything in
> > your tag library that would prevent this approach?
>
> Yes. I want to be able to combine XPath and XSLT operations together- such
> as to style a fragment of a document - so the XSLT tags in XTags are
> dependent on the XPath engine (dom4j right now).
Guess I don't follow here. You're using JAXP to do your transformations,
right? So any transformation you're doing inside your current taglib, it
should be possible to do in another taglib. I'd be OK with
building support for DOM, dom4j, etc. objects into the XSL taglib, if
that's what it takes. Perhaps we can do some creative organization of the
classes to avoid runtime dependencies.
>
> > Some of the XTags
> > features you mention are also present in XSL rel2, and the others could be
> > merged in
>
> Due to the XPath dependencies (e.g. dom4j) its probably best if we keep
> these 2 libraries seperate for now.
>
> XSL rel2 for just JAXP based XSLT
>
> XTags for XSLT + XPath and the rest (<xtags:forEach>, <xtags:valueOf>
> <xtags:choose> / <xtags:when> /<xtags:otherwise> and so on).
I'm OK with that, if we can finagle it so that your XSLT logic is
literally driven by the classes in the XSL tags. I think it's overkill to
have competing implementations within the same project.
If we note on the XSL page that the classes are also included in XTags,
then both projects benefit, I would think. Maybe I should experiment a
little with that. Creating larger tag libraries from slices of more
focused tag libraries is an appealing concept to me.
>
> > If you don't think that's a reasonable approach, I'd just as
> > soon deprecate the XSL tag library than have competing
> > implementations.
>
> > Maybe that's the way to go, but I suspect some people
> > just want to do transformations.
>
>
> Agreed, lets keep XSL for those who just want to do XSLT with minimal
> dependencies (just JAXP).
>
> > I suspect that the XSLT interface would
> > be stronger and have more contributors as a result, and I bet so would the
> > XPATH support.
>
> I'd prefer to just have one tag library for working with XML which included
> XPath and XSLT really but I agree that some may wish to only depend on JAXP.
>
> James
>
I could be talked into that, as long as they're using overlapping
code. Otherwise, I would rather drop support for the XSL taglib. You're
tags are more mature than rel1, and rel2 is just on a branch and therefore
relatively hidden from the users for now.
- Morgan
