I have had significant experience working both with XSL's and JSP's, and I was wondering, is there some way in which a developer can use a JSP or a JSP-like templating component to perform tasks similar to XSL's?
Even though it's quite true that both XSL's and JSP's have been developed keeping in mind different sets of problems, but fundamentally speaking, both of these technologies are used to transform/template an input format of data to another one. This may involve a change of format => XML/Java Objects to HTML/Text or might simply involve a rearrangement or addition of new fields/properties in the same format.
But where they are quite different is the fact that while with XSL's a developer still has a handle after the transformation, but with JSP's once the transformation is done, the response is flushed directly to the client.
Also, if one would want to leverage the Taglib functionality of JSP's in having a templating tool other than XSL, does there exist a solution? For someone who's not too comfortable with the XSLT syntaxes, but has a firm understanding of JSTL and the likes, this can actually be really helpful.
I hope I managed to express my point clearly, and look forward to some helpful insights.
Thanks!
[ May 01, 2008: Message edited by: Anirvan Majumdar ]