Hi Costin,
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2001 10:20 AM
>
> ...
>
> I'm working on a refactoring of jasper, and "easy to read" is a big
> priority. It's moving a bit slower than I expected - now I'm back on
> planning stage after hearing so much bad things about using XSLT :-) But I
> think there are ways to make ( almost ) everyone happy.
>
> ...
Considering your day job, I already had to change my "diagnostic" from
"you don't know what you are messing with" to "you know too much about
XSLT and then you think it is easy for everybody".
Still, I do not believe that using XSLT is a good idea. It goes a bit
against your own motivation of making Jasper more readable to make the
entry level lower for potential contributors.
Besides learning about Jasper, many will have to learn about XSLT. And
XSLT is not that easy to grasp. Worse, it is elusive - one tends to
think to have it all figured out before time, and then fall easy prey
of really big traps.
I am not going to argue with you about the CPU cost issue, since your
POV seems to be that everybody should manually compile JSPs for
production and that developers have good enough machines anyway.
We could start another holly war on this one, but I do not have the
motivation. I think that many people prefer doing it without manual
compilation, but we better just agree to disagree on that.
Anyway, for me, the main issue is the complexity of XSLT being an
obstacle for Jasper's code readability/maintenance.
In case you are wondering, I do not intend to use JSP for presentation
(I keep that Velocity is better at that) but I still think it as a lot
of potential as a server side scripting mechanism, with taglibs
providing an interesting way of defining simple dialects for common
problems and embedded Java filling the gaps. For simple logic, it looks
to have potential.
Have fun,
Paulo Gaspar
