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RE: [xsl] XSL in the AJAX world


Subject: RE: [xsl] XSL in the AJAX world
From: "Scott Trenda" <Scott.Trenda@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 10:48:23 -0500

JSON, while quick to use for grabbing a handful of data on the client
side without traversing the DOM, is all but useless on the server back
end. If you look into a lot of the server-side scripts that preach the
usefulness of JSON in AJAX, you'll find that they're brute-force hacking
together strings in PHP, and most of their solutions are extremely
static. Personally, I use XML/XSLT the most in my server-side scripts.
Get the XML data back from a database/session/file/user, and transform
it into whatever purpose you need it to fulfill. Like I mentioned, JSON
isn't useless, it's just not (even close to) the be-all-end-all solution
to data transfer and manipulation. An extremely powerful hybrid I've
used a few times involves transforming the XML into JSON and kicking
that out to the client for an AJAX response. What's the easiest way to
do that? XSLT, of course.

XML and XSLT are useful for the long haul - when you have to port your
data across languages, across frameworks, and from the server to the
client. There is *nothing* even nearly as powerful as XSLT to perform
mass transformations on JSON data - like I said, once the data is there,
it's stuck in that format. The Web world hasn't quite caught on yet, but
serving XML data that has an initial XSL transformation to set up the
HTML can save loads of bandwidth.

For what it's worth, XSLT is a fairly esoteric technology (but one with
a huge sideline support crowd, as you see here). Don't let some jackass
on the interwebs tell you it's useless. ~_^

~ Scott


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Shooner [mailto:ashooner@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 10:19 AM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [xsl] XSL in the AJAX world

This is not a technical question, much broader.

I develop websites using the XSLT-based Symphony CMS, and another user
shared a comment he received that XML/XSLT was 'so 1990's'. It was
suggested to him to move on to JSON-based languages/technology. My
response was that it has to end up as XML in the end, so there is at
least some use for it.

So my question is, are there many AJAX developers on this list, and if
so, how frequently, and in what capacity, do you use XSL in building or
customizing AJAX web applications?


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