[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Even if you're not ... was If you're going to the W3C meet
Hi, Alan! I used the XSLT + ANT approach to good effect in the creation of workflows for an automated publishing system a few years back. The XSLT made it possible to templatize "filters" -- ANT scripts -- for different customers, in effect providing a clean user interface for defining workflow blocks that could then be retained or modified if the customer wished to run new books for publishing. It's a VERY powerful approach, and something I would recommend far above trying to script such work directly. I've stayed away from Maven precisely for the reasons that you mentioned, something I've heard echoed elsewhere. My experience with DOM in general has been that it only really makes sense when the number of changes involved in working with an XML document are VERY small - and even there I often found that as I want to work with other pieces of data, I will inevitably reach a point where its simply easier to throw out the DOM code completely and rewrite it as parameterized transformations. I like your comment about "if there is no one else doing it, there must be something wrong with the approach". One of the things that I've come to realize over the years is that, at least as far as XSLT and related technologies is concerned, the reason that no one else is doing it is because there are only recently enough people in the field to even conceive that it was doable this way in the first place. In other words, I think that many people on this list especially tend to be pioneers, effectively the first to either approach a problem this way or at the minimum the first to publish these approaches in the literature. I think that the book on XSLT best practices has not yet been written (though Michael Kay comes close). --- Kurt Cagle --- http://www.understandingxml.com > I've only recently begun to use XSLT outside of a web server for > standard programming tasks. > > I'm using XSLT to generate my Ant scripts. It works well. Very > well. I don't know why more people haven't done this. XSLT is a > standard task in Ant, and it is all you need to make up for the > lack of conditionals in Ant itself. > > I'd wanted to use XSLT in Ant for quite some time, since I > started programming in Java in 2003. If I think about it, these > where the blocks. > > 1) Experience with Maven, which left me the with the impression > that scripting in XML, in certian situations, was somehow > inheriently foolish. > > Maven is a solution that uses an XML language to generate > Ant. It is complex and tempremental. It is difficult to > read. If you know Ant, that knowledge is lost since your Ant > is burried in another language, Jelly. > > Maybe it's because those are /my/ angle brackets, but my > XSLT code is easy to read and it is easy to add a new task > to all my projects. > > 2) If it is such an obvious solution, and no one is doing it, > then, there must be something wrong. > > I used XSLT with XUL, to great effect on a project in 2003, and > that's why I'm here, fascinated with XML and XSLT, and what else > you can do with them. > > XUL or XHTML are excellent applications of XSLT. > > As far as PDE goes, why have AST's for the code editor at all? > Why not have XML, XPath, and XSLT? > > -- > Alan Gutierrez - alan@e... > -- Kurt Cagle http://www.understandingxml.com
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