I agree that XSLT with large documents in intensively memory hungry. Unless you cache the content result or have a large parts of content that share redundant sub parts then it is big requirement on the final production system.
The other end of the scale is XSLT with smaller syndication sites. I am talking about the Rich Site Summary and other portal sites like My Netscape Netcenter, Meerkat and Radio Userland where you can efficient use an XSLT to transform an RSS file in real time. The other toolkit to use other than SAX or DOM is JDOM. JDOM is pretty easy to use and you could write a hard core XML to HTML transformation. inJjava -- Peter Pilgrim | | ++44 (0)207-545-9923 .... \ \ ___ / / ... . - ---- ( * ) --- -- _____________________________Cafe_Savannah,_San Antonio,Ibiza__ ---------------------------------------- Message History ---------------------------------------- From: "Matthew O'Haire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on 03/10/2001 09:51 ZE10 Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "'[EMAIL PROTECTED]'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> cc: Subject: RE: Struts MVC Framework Vs. XSLT Tranformation for Web UI Handli ng A project I worked on recently used a Servlet/XML/XSLT design, where XML data was retrieved from and EJB session layer and transformed into HTML using dynamically generated XSL sheets (the customer could choose which elements they wanted in their view... the combinations of selections allowed the XSL to be dynamically generated). Very sweet. Unfortunately it suffered from memory issues as some of the content was quite large (300K+). Holding the XML DOM in memory and performing the XSLT all consumed a huge amount of RAM... it would work O.K. with a few users but clearly was going to have scalability issues. The speed of the XSL translation was also pretty dismal. Time constraints made us switch to a more straight forward servlet design... Things may have improved since this project (about 1.5 years ago) in terms of memory and performance. We didn't look at using SAX or anything else in that arena... In hindsight I still think that the XSL stylesheet is just an extension of presentation code. I don't know many HTML/Creative types that know how to write XSL... I'd guess that most of the time it will be technical people who write the XSL... if that's the case, then why not use the language we know best, Java. You can write a "transformer/producer" class in Java for any given XML and output (HTML, XML, etc). Everything we wanted to achive can be done with Struts/JSP and some other things like Tiles, and some "home grown" custom tags. In the end we looked at the skills that we had available and decided (on our next major project) to go the Struts route... and it was a much more sucessful project. Maybe you'll have more sucess with XSLT, and I wouldn't rule it out, certainly in areas where it is a good fit. If I was to use that technology again, I'd find the bits that fit best (i.e. generating page segements) and mix the whole lot with Struts... Anyhow, good luck. Matto. -----Original Message----- From: Michael Baldwin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 02:48 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Struts MVC Framework Vs. XSLT Tranformation for Web UI Handling Interesting. We're actually considering prototyping a solution that uses a bit of both. I'm thinking about using the MVC framework of Struts to implement application flow control, using stateless EJB to provide services and using JSP or a servlet to transform the resultant value objects into a nice DOM tree which I'd then pass off to a XSLT Processor to do the final work. I know that a lot of value of struts is in the tag libraries (internationalization, validation, etc.) but I still don't like the way that JSPs windup looking like something that a programmer would have to modify, rather than a web designer. I think XSLT gets us a little bit closer to an end goal of separating presentation from content. How do other people feel about this? Has anyone here looked at Cocoon functionality? I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts. --Michael Minh Tran wrote: > I'm pretty new to struts.. so I would appreciate if anyone can share their > experiences with Struts and XSLT Transformation for the Web UI generation. > I am starting a project pretty soon.. and the project lead is pushing to do > a Servlet-XSLT model where XML + XSL will be transformed to HTML for the UI. > I am currently pushing for Struts.. but I need some more ammo so that I can > push struts as the framework for us. > > Thanks, > Minh Tran -- This e-mail may contain confidential and/or privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient (or have received this e-mail in error) please notify the sender immediately and destroy this e-mail. Any unauthorized copying, disclosure or distribution of the material in this e-mail is strictly forbidden.