>
> Well, I don't think its anti-taglib sentiment as much as it is
> pro-provider cheering.  Taglibs definitely have their place, and IMHO
> can be a much more powerful mechanism for developing web applications
> than conventional PHP or ASP code can.  However, Providers are just so
> much more powerful than Taglibs that I shudder at the thought that I
> might one day have to go back to using PHP.
>

Well, I guess I could come in on the other side...

I LIKE taglibs for some things. They have some disadvantages, but its easy to 
avoid some of the pitfalls. My philosophy is to only use a taglib as a thin 
wrapper over some underlying perl modules. So in no case is there any LOGIC 
in my taglibs to speak of beyond "Go get the current user object from the 
session and call XYZ::somefunction(user)" or somesuch. In my XSP I can then 
deal with some of the XML generation, things like "Oh, I need to add in the 
links this user is able to see if they're an admin" kind of stuff. It also 
lets you tweak certain things. For example often I might have a link on a 
page that can only be seen from that page and otherwise my navigation is the 
same as all the other pages, so instead of having a different stylesheet 
template etc you can just have something like

<sidenav>
        <nav:getstandardnav/>
        <morelinks>
                <link ..../>
        </morelinks>
</sidenav>

and my standard XSLT sidenav rendering template knows to add those extra links 
into the page if it finds any. And if you need to conditionalize them you can 
do it with an <xsp:if/> etc.

Not that a provider can't do all that too, but then you have to figure out 
WHICH page your dealing with in the provider and have logic there to figure 
it out, or everything has to go in some datastore someplace, whereas if you 
defer that stuff to XSP it can be packaged up with the page.

Not sure why everyone thinks XSP is hard to debug, you just have to be 
disciplined about your exception handling... These days I rarely run into 
much problem there since whatever classes I'm wrapping are always well tested 
and most other errors are either XML syntax or just bad logic in XSP (which I 
keep pretty simple anyway).

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