jsp or xsl

[ashok ganesan]

hi all ,
i m just trying to develop a simple database management application following the mvc pattern . for presentation part i m bit confused to use either jsp or xsl. i just need to know the difference between the two in their performance ,scalability , simplicity . so accordingly i could choose the language to use.
if someone could help me out .

thanks in advance
ashok

[Paul Clapham]

I have done applications both ways. I don't know about performance or scalability because they weren't high-volume applications. I would suggest that JSP is more intuitive for web applications than XSLT is, and also that you will find more people who are proficient in JSP than in XSLT to do the work.

[Lasse Koskela]

I'd strongly recommend JSP over XSL. The latter can easily become an unmaintainable, complex mess and writing the XSL stylesheets isn't the easiest of tasks in the first place...

[Bear Bibeault]

I'm in the JSP camp. The only reasons I have ever used XSL over JSP is when the same data needs to be renderred in enough different formats that it made the headaches of XSL worthwhile.

For just delivering web application pages, using XSL is like hitting yourself in the forehead with a hammer -- completely needless.

And, as of JSP 2.0, the few web apps I've written that render XML in differnt formats use JSP with the JSTL XML tags in favor of XSL.

[Joe San]

Even I prefer to go the jsp way as using XSL for big sized projects or mid sized projects can become messy over a period of time.

[ashok ganesan]

hi first thanks all for your replies . i m totally amazed that everyone is for jsp and in fact feel that coding in xsl is going to be the toughest job. but is there any one good reason for using xsl. because i have heard that some people still use xsl in their application for their presentation part by rendering the xml returned by controller or model. is that any particular feature that xsl could do but not jsp . and what could have made this people to choose xsl rather than jsp.



thanks all

ashok

[Paul Clapham]

The "model" in a web application typically contains information stored either as session attributes or as request attributes. A JSP has access to those attributes built in, whereas XSLT does not, so you would need extra work to allow XSLT to access the model. So that's something specific in favour of JSP.

What could be an application where XSLT would be not a bad choice? In the application I wrote using XSLT, all of the pages had a common structure. This makes it easy to write a transformation per page, because xsl:include can be used a lot. But such applications are uncommon; they are visually boring and so they can only really be used in places where the users have no choice but to use them.

[ashok ganesan]

hey paul as you said i was just trying some sample program in xsl . all my pages have got same structure like drawing header , result table , placing buttons . i just wrote a common xsl code and using import i could call the particular template for header,table & buttons. and for specific behavior for particular page i just overridden the template in that page alone . so in this case as you said xsl coding is easy and less coding is to be done. but i just want to know if this could be done in jsp or is this kind of coding is not appreciated to do in jsp.

    
[B]my xsl & xml  code looks like this[/B]
 
[B]xml file[/B]
 
<DATA>
<header>
</header>
<info>Name</info>
<info>Date</info>
<info>Place</info>
<info>Experience</info>
<result>
<row> some data here which will be drawn in the table</row>
<row>some data here which will be drawn in the table</row>
<row>some data here which will be drawn in the table</row>
<row>some data here which will be drawn in the table</row>
</result>
<buttons>
<name>ok</name>
<name>cancel</name>
</buttons>
</DATA>
 
[B]common.xsl[/B]
 
 <xsl:template name="drawTabAndHeaderInfo">
manage the info tag
</xsl:template>
 

 <xsl:template name="drawResultTable">
manage the row tag
</xsl:template>
 

 <xsl:template name="drawButtons">
manage the button name tag
</xsl:template>
 

[B]other pages.xsl[/B]
 
will call have import statement
and call each template or sometimes will override if needed
 

thanks all

ashok