Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
Interesting comments here at ApacheCon. Some users are still convinced that we're pushing XSP as the prominent way to build interactive stuff and web applications. Actually on the site there is no particular endorsement of XSP, but there not either a word of warning about this approach being "deprecated" in favor of the flow idea. I do think that it would be nice to put some carefully thought out phrasing on the main XSP page stating that, while still supported, we do think that there are now better alternatives for dynamic websites/applications.
WDYT?
Hah... I don't think we should bring up a Flow vs. XSP discussion. That's comparing pears with apples (not the ones in the CVS or the one you are reading this on ;)
XSP and Flow have different concerns! XSP is a serverpage - more kind of a view while Flow is more like a controller.
If you wanna compare you need to compare Flow vs. Actions and XSP vs. Transformers (or other server pages / templating approaches).
The discussion really takes a strange way when comparing these both concepts.
But in fact it seems like XSP is being disliked by many developers. And I have to admit: I don't really like much anymore, too. But the question is whether it is because of the syntax or the heavy machinery or it's maintainability.
IMO it's obvious: the mixture of coding languages (Java + XML) and the mixture of abstraction levels. But this abstraction does not make the coding easier, you have to know the implementation details to work around all possible mistakes: How often it is suggested to have a look at the generated Java files! In general we need a XML only XSP (i.e. without any Java written by hand) with minimum of flow support:
<xsp:if>, <xsp:for-each>, etc.
Yes, afterwards it's very similar to XSLT or other template languages as JXTemplate.
The power of XSP is not XSP itself, but the further abstraction levels as esql as Leszek pointed out. This would make an XML only XSP to a really powerful template language in contrary to a programming language with nasty syntax at the moment.
Joerg
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