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Re: [xsl] XSLT Consulting Market?


Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT Consulting Market?
From: Adam Turoff <ziggy@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2003 10:02:48 -0500

On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 07:28:50PM -0800, hnorris norris wrote:
> Is there much of a demand for high
> level XSLT development these days?

It depends on what you mean by "high level XSLT development".  :-)

The very nature of XSLT development is vastly different than,
say, Java development.  While some shops may use XSLT extensively,
I doubt that you'll ever see very many XSLT equivalents of the
canonical 100,000 line Java enterprise system.

(The DocBook XSLT stylesheets come close at 69KLOC, which is quite
impressive.  To be fair, though, there's a lot of repetition there,
and most XML vocabularies I've styled with XSLT aren't nearly as
large, nor do they need to target as many outputs.)

> Most recent job postings I've seen that list an XSLT
> requirment seem to include it as a minor adjunct to
> other technologies, suggesting to me that XSLT is not
> yet a mainstream technology, and that most projects
> are only using it in fairly low level ways.

I'd refute both of those assertions.  

It's not that XSLT is not mainstream, only that it is not a solitary
technology.  XSLT is often used in conjunction with Java, C, Perl,
etc. as part of a complete solution.  It would be more accurate to
state that XSLT has not emerged as a specialization in and of
itself, but rather is still a specialized skill that XML-savvy
programmers use in the realm of XML processing, like SAX and DOM.
(When was the last time you saw an ad for a SAX or a DOM programmer?)

Companies that are using XSLT extensively tend to use a small number
of XML vocabularies (1 to 3) and generate a variety of outputs.
Alternatively, they may deal with a variety of inputs and normalize
that to a smaller number of output vocabularies.  This reduces the need
to have a team of 50 dedicated XSLT programmers.  

And, let's not forget that XSLT is a *great* way to do simple cleanup
and write throwaway programs.  A few minutes hacking/customizing a
stylesheet can eliminate the need to spend a few days on a Java program
to do the same thing.  Just another reason why there are so few
"high level XSLT development" needs in the field today.  This does not
mean that XSLT is exclusively used in "low level" ways, just that this
is where it provides the most leverage.

The situation is by no means bleak.  It's just different than what you
may expect based on other skillsets in demand.

Z.


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