Is there a point creating a site using XSLT

Question

Is this technology still popular?

I want to make a website which automatically transforms XSLT files. It should work like this: When a user accesses the site, a single handler would accept his request and then find a suitable XML for it (according to the URL requested) and transform it using its attached XSL file.

I want to do this in order to make it easy to update the site using plain XML files (instead of using a full-fledged & expensive CMS system).

What do you say? good idea? bad idea? anyone has a recommendation?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Back in 2002-2003 I did a lot with XSLT (and some more in 2006-2007). Your mileage on this will vary but honestly I would avoid it, for several reasons:

• The syntax is a blinding headspin, hard to learn, hard to get right and just plain gives you a headache. The templates themselves aren't too bad but throw in some gnarly XPath expressions and it just hurts;
• For reasonably sized documents and transforms it is relatively slow. Whether or not it's slow enough to be relevant to you is something you'll only find with benchmarking your scenario so don't take this as a blanket rule, more of a cautionary tale or a caveat;
• Error messages just aren't that useful and it can be hard to figure out problems. Unlike a more traditional approach, you can't whip out a debugger and step through an XSLT;
• Generating HTML with any modern Web-flavoured language (C#, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc) is trivial, straightforward, easy to log and easy to debug;
• Manipulating XML is arguably more tedious and produces more code that directly manipulating objects and converting them into markup. This of course will vary by what tools your chosen language provides you with.

The only place I can really see having an application for XSLT these days is in consuming Web services that produce XML (lots produce JSON and more easily consumed formats these days).

And even in that case I'd probably still manipulate the XML directly with, say, JAXB in Java (or similar technologies in other languages).

Update: I just came across The Death of XSLT in Web Frameworks. For example:

For example: how to hide the row in table (using different CSS style), based on some CONDITION, with XSLT? See:

<tr>
  <xsl:attribute name="style">
    <xsl:choose>
      <xsl:when test="CONDITION">
        <xsl:value-of select="'visibility: visible'">
      </xsl:when>
      <xsl:otherwise>
        <xsl:value-of select="'visibility: collapse'">
      </xsl:otherwise>
    </xsl:choose>
  </xsl:attribute>
  ...
</tr>

and now the same with JSP 1.x:

<tr style='visibility:<%=CONDITION ? "collapse" : "visible"%>'>
   ...
</tr>

or with JSP 2.x:

<tr style='visibility:${CONDITION ? "collapse" : "visible"}'>
  ...
</tr>

summarized by:

So if you start new project, think twice (or ten times) before jumping into XSLT. And > if you use Eclipse, you can even think twice before using JSP/JSTL. Velocity or > FreeMarker might be a better option.

Answer 2

XSLT is just one method of templating. It is also just one piece of a complete MVC framework, where templating being the View component. XSLT is a great technology, but it's slow and not a first choice on building a scalable web site.

Research on MVC frameworks to see which one fits you best. e.g. ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, Catalyst, etc.

Answer 3

Sounds like a bad idea to me. It's much easier to use something like ASP.NET with the content stored in a database - you can then update the content directly into the database - which in itself will be easier than editing the XML.

Answer 4

I know few big web portals which work using XSLT a lot, here in Poland. They used because it can minimize the amount of data sent over the network.

I also worked on the project (Huge HRM application) and we used it there to transform our programming language to .NET.

I would say it is sometimes very useful.

Answer 5

Answers based on "the syntax is hard" is no answer at all imho. A). It really isn't, and B). You're supposed to be a programmer, just learn it.

Definitely other technologies are advancing at a pace XSLT hasn't since 2005ish, but it remains a powerful tool which gives you a level of abstraction that, say, asp.net webforms don't, and allows you to provide a general scalable solution to trivially serialise to a range of output formats. It's easy to generate HTML with any given language, it's harder to now extend that to XML, now extend that to JSON, now extend that to CSV.

And cached transforms are plenty fast enough in an environment which is still I/O bound.

OTOH, storing data in XML is generally not a good idea. Far better to store in a DB/mem and serialise as required for all the reasons above.

Answer 6

At work, a project I'm on uses XSLT and to be honest, it's a real pain. The actual XSLT files aren't that difficult to work with, but having to create XML adds an extra layer of complexity. I've also found that beyond the most basic pages, the XML tends to get very bloated and messy. So, no, I wouldn't recommend it.

Answer 7

Take a look at http://www.umbraco.org/ It is a free open source CMS tool that uses XSLT extensively to generate pages.

To all those who claim XSLT is hard I would say that it is no harder than SQL. There are scenario's that are hard such as grouping, just like in SQL trees are hard.

Pick the right tool for the right job and you shouldn't have any problems.

Answer 8

I want to do this in order to make it easy to update the site using plain XML files (instead of using a full-fledged & expensive CMS system).

Er, what? There are many free and open-source CMSs.

What spoulson said above about templating is the point. Providing output pages from input XML files is fine. But that doesn't get you a CMS. What about C.R.U.D.? Search? Page listings?

If your site is so small that all the relevant updating can be done by you hand-editing some XML files, then why not, go for it. But if it's that simple you might as well just edit HTML by hand.

Answer 9

I like the idea. XSL is a fantastic tool, but you have to have that special moment of enlightenment before you realise how useful it really is. Before that it just seems so-so.

I have used XSL in a variety of applications and it has saved me a lot of time. But obviously dont just use it for the sake of it.

Answer 10

What you are describing already exists and is Apache Cocoon: http://cocoon.apache.org/

Answer 11

If your platform is ASP.NET check out myxsl.net

XSLT gives you the ability to do unobtrusive templating, which is IMO the ultimate kind of templating.

Answer 12

As a side note, wowarmory.com is a good example of a high traffic site that uses XSLT. In fact, I think the whole site uses it.

Answer 13

xslt is hard?

It's a programmers job to tackle complex problems and complex standards. There's stuff that is way harder and still needed. Just keep going at it and get's easier each time you need to learn new stuff.

Xslt is easy.

Really! There are good books out there that teach you xslt. Just learn e.g. rdf/owl (a w3c standard) and it can still get much more complex...

xslt is slow? Just use the right caching if you can. (ok, its not always possible...).

Just read about REST (some book or Roy Fielding dissertation) that's essential stuff too.

Now with XProc (xslt piplines) and a small restserver around calabash (Xproc implementaion) you can archive so much. it can definitly save you time. any data can be exportet to XML, made aviliable via REST and transformed with XProc.

Answer 14

Symphony CMS uses XSLT. While using that CMS I found that the only real problems I had were to do with learning the XSL/XPath syntax, mostly due to a lack of good tutorials/documentation. Might be worth giving Symphony a try if you want to see some relatively modern XSLT usage.