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[xsl] XSLT and Golden Hammers ...

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On my musings:

Dimitre's warning about the sequential occurrence of code in
XSLT templates not implying sequential execution of side-effects
(if any) is still spinning in my mind. I am doing quite a bit
of interaction with the real world in my XSLT work and one of
those is JDBC access.

J.Pietschmann wrote:

Looks like the Golden Hammer syndrome.
What's wrong with generating the XML with some Java code or
some other language (like Cocoon XSP or SQL Transformer), and
apply XSLT to the result?

What's wrong with doing it in XSLT? My motive for not using
anything but XSLT and Java is simply a matter of consolidating
an unnecessary plethora of tools to depend on. The reason I'm
not doing this in Java is that I can script these things
very nicely with XSLT using JDBC directly. My point is to keep
all information as proper XML node(-sets) at all times and
use XSLT instead of tedious API calls to navigate information
structures.

XSLT is a very powerful functional language with a very usable way
to integrate to Java that makes XSLT into a scripting language for
XML and Java. I do not think it's a golden hammer syndrome. In fact,
I believe that while the XSLT design team (and the community
supporting XSLT on this list) is blessed by some exceptionally
smart people who make sure that the language is actually sound
and simple (compare that with the JSP blurb or with Perl :-). Because
of this, it is no wonder that the result has far more use than the
original motivating purpose. While I am very sympathetic with the
designers protecting their language from becomming a swiss-army-knife,
I hope that there will continue to be openness toward new and exciting
uses.

regards,
-Gunther

--
Gunther Schadow, M.D., Ph.D.                    gschadow@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Medical Information Scientist      Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
Adjunct Assistant Professor        Indiana University School of Medicine
tel:1(317)630-7960                         http://aurora.regenstrief.org

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