...Also, my development team is experienced with XSL. I'm concerned about how they will react to XSL. They are experienced JSP developers. What kind of balking might I encounter? How can I get them to give XSL a fair assessment? Any tips on convincing them of the benefits?...
I assume you mean "not experienced".
I've been doing quite a lot of XSLT in the last two years, also mentoring several programmers coming from various backgrounds. It has been a success for people who were open-minded about accepting comments and adapt their way of working to what XSLT does best, and a failure with people who tried to write (for example) java-like code in XSLT, without taking advantage of specific XSLT features and way of working.
What I like in XSLT is that it is very concise if written correctly (in terms of number of constructs - of course the XML syntax is a pain), often writing a few templates does the job *but* it might take a lot of reflexion to write them. As always, building simple things takes a lot of brainpower.
For me the move from java to XSLT is similar to moving to an object-oriented language from a procedural one: you have to change your state of mind, if you keep on working "the old way" with the new tool it fails.
So I'd say the advantages are that you will write much less XSLT code than java code to achieve the same results (which means less code to test and maintain), but unless your people are willing to learn XSLT properly and understand "the XSLT way" they might be frustrated by the results.
Compared to JSP, I think XSLT's advantages are mostly in the ability to generate different formats (HTML, HTML+CSS, SVG, PDF, RTF, WAP, etc.) with similar tools and reusable chunks of XSLT code. If your app produces only HTML the difference in maintainability might not be so important.
Hope this helps, -- Bertrand Delacretaz independent consultant, Lausanne, Switzerland http://cvs.apache.org/~bdelacretaz/
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