On Sat, 21 Apr 2001, Joachim Zobel wrote:
>
> Hi.
>
> I try to understand why and if this XML/XSL stuff is useful. Is it that
> transformations (XSL) of XML to HTML can be used instead of the usual HTML
> templates (eg. Template-Toolkit)?
Partly. But XSLT is also able to transform documents, which is an
incredibly useful feature that no other Perl templating module (except
XPathScript) is able to do well. Hard to describe without an example, of
which there are plenty on the 'net so I won't spam the group here.
> Can this do what a template engine can
> do? Where are the limitations? Is there something it can't do?
Not really, AxKit is as powerful as the other solutions out there, I'd
say (well I would, wouldn't I :-). The one thing I think AxKit does really
well, that other "templating" solutions aren't really designed for, is
allowing you to build your whole web site with that solution. So for
example, Mason and EmbPerl are really great for building the dynamic parts
of your site, whereas (I imagine, from experience) people will build the
more static parts of their site with just plain HTML. Whereas with AxKit
the XML + Stylesheets approach applies much more broadly to the whole
site.
Now I'm probably going to get replies to this saying how EmbPerl and Mason
and (insert other solution) can do this. And I'm sure they can. I just
think it's more natural with AxKit.
Having said that, it goes the other way too - currently building web
applications is probably a lot easier with Mason than it is with AxKit,
because that's what it was designed for. AxKit has a pretty cool
technology called XSP, which gives you a cold-fusion like system of
inserting tags into your XML for dynamic functionality. But in my opinion
it doesn't scale well (in the development sense, not in the performance
sense) to large applications, because it is inherently a page-based
technology (like PHP, Cold Fusion, JSP, ASP, etc), and I don't think
page-based web development systems scale well to larger applications. I
prefer something that is turned inside-out from the page based view of
things, like MVC.
I have another article on this coming soon that should make things a bit
(or a lot) clearer. I'll keep the list informed when it's ready.
--
<Matt/>
/|| ** Founder and CTO ** ** http://axkit.com/ **
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// || ** http://axkit.org ** ** XSLT, XPathScript, XSP **
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