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Re: [xsl] Are there things missing in XSLT which force people to use, say, Java to process XML?


Subject: Re: [xsl] Are there things missing in XSLT which force people to use, say, Java to process XML?
From: Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:10:41 +0100

On 29/10/2010 16:37, cknell@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Abraham Maslow said in 1966, "It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."


But actually sometimes it's better to use a sub-optimal tool than to invest the time to learn a new one. I know full well that I sometimes do things in XSLT that would be better done in Perl, so I have a lot of sympathy with Perl experts who do the opposite. We can't all be experts in everything.

I think there are two reasons people use Java when they could be using XSLT. One is skills-based inertia - not investing the time to learn new tricks. The other is architectural drift - the project starts out being 90% things that Java is good at, and 10% XML processing, so Java is quite reasonably adopted; and then the balance slowly drifts, but there is never a good time to switch horses. The two often go together when you have a project full of Java developers that slowly starts doing more and more XML.

Michael Kay
Saxonica


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