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Hi, Alan!
I used the XSLT + ANT approach to good effect in the creation of
workflows for an automated publishing system a few years back. The
XSLT made it possible to templatize "filters" -- ANT scripts -- for
different customers, in effect providing a clean user interface for
defining workflow blocks that could then be retained or modified if
the customer wished to run new books for publishing. It's a VERY
powerful approach, and something I would recommend far above trying to
script such work directly.
I've stayed away from Maven precisely for the reasons that you
mentioned, something I've heard echoed elsewhere. My experience with
DOM in general has been that it only really makes sense when the
number of changes involved in working with an XML document are VERY
small - and even there I often found that as I want to work with other
pieces of data, I will inevitably reach a point where its simply
easier to throw out the DOM code completely and rewrite it as
parameterized transformations.
I like your comment about "if there is no one else doing it, there
must be something wrong with the approach". One of the things that
I've come to realize over the years is that, at least as far as XSLT
and related technologies is concerned, the reason that no one else is
doing it is because there are only recently enough people in the field
to even conceive that it was doable this way in the first place. In
other words, I think that many people on this list especially tend to
be pioneers, effectively the first to either approach a problem this
way or at the minimum the first to publish these approaches in the
literature. I think that the book on XSLT best practices has not yet
been written (though Michael Kay comes close).
--- Kurt Cagle
--- http://www.understandingxml.com
> I've only recently begun to use XSLT outside of a web server for
> standard programming tasks.
>
> I'm using XSLT to generate my Ant scripts. It works well. Very
> well. I don't know why more people haven't done this. XSLT is a
> standard task in Ant, and it is all you need to make up for the
> lack of conditionals in Ant itself.
>
> I'd wanted to use XSLT in Ant for quite some time, since I
> started programming in Java in 2003. If I think about it, these
> where the blocks.
>
> 1) Experience with Maven, which left me the with the impression
> that scripting in XML, in certian situations, was somehow
> inheriently foolish.
>
> Maven is a solution that uses an XML language to generate
> Ant. It is complex and tempremental. It is difficult to
> read. If you know Ant, that knowledge is lost since your Ant
> is burried in another language, Jelly.
>
> Maybe it's because those are /my/ angle brackets, but my
> XSLT code is easy to read and it is easy to add a new task
> to all my projects.
>
> 2) If it is such an obvious solution, and no one is doing it,
> then, there must be something wrong.
>
> I used XSLT with XUL, to great effect on a project in 2003, and
> that's why I'm here, fascinated with XML and XSLT, and what else
> you can do with them.
>
> XUL or XHTML are excellent applications of XSLT.
>
> As far as PDE goes, why have AST's for the code editor at all?
> Why not have XML, XPath, and XSLT?
>
> --
> Alan Gutierrez - alan@engrm.com
>
--
Kurt Cagle
http://www.understandingxml.com
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