August 30, 2003
On XSLT and Cocoon
Russell Beattie writes: I'm not totally against XSLT, I just think that it's not a programming language which is what many apps - like Cocoon - make it into. It's best for transforms only, in my opinion, anything beyond that makes it impossible to develop and maintain.
An interesting viewpoint, and while I don't pretend to know what he's building, his technical description further on makes me think he missed out on quite a bit of how Cocoon works, and how you can use XSLT within it.
For example: Mostly it's simple stuff for example, if you're logged in, you get an additional link to edit or delete that page. But it's still *logic* that would be a bitch in XSLT to work out correctly and maintain. That's where the problem is. Don't put logic in the XSLT if you can help it. Have an action, xsp, or whatever you like somewhere further up the line to create the login information as XML. Then, in the XSLT, all you need to do is <xsl:template match="your-login-details-tag">.
I do agree with Russ on one thing though: Once we get the tools standardized, living in XML within our apps is going to be the only way to do things -- amen!
I'm off to read Jon Udell's articles on The document is the database and XSLT Recipes for Interacting with XML Data now...
Posted by savs at August 30, 2003 10:36 AM