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Hi Jim,
jimtronic wrote:
> I'm curious ... What is the benefit of using XSL when you could parse
> and display XML using a server side scripting language like jsp or
> php?
JSPs are good for generating HTML on a smarter mail-merge model (the
XSLT people call it the "pull" model). And obviously they're great for
when you need to get a lot of general-purpose programming language
features, like talking to the operating system.
XSLT has at has advantages in at least two cases. The first is any case
where you have a "push" transform - where you want the structure of the
incoming data to drive the construction of the output. XSLT allows you
to define templates which match particular incoming patterns and process
them. The second is that XSLT programs are themselves XML, and therefore
appropriate input or output for XSLT. Yesterday I helped some colleagues
write a two-phase transform for a tricky requirement. I haven't tried
this in JSP but it doesn't look like something I'd want to try.
Francis.
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