Hi Paul and Alan,
Thanks for these thoughtful commentsbthis is a really interesting direction.
I wasnbt familiar with Servlex, but after looking at it, I can see exactly
what youbre describing: a fully declarative web application model where HTTP
handling, pipelines, and transformations are all expressed in XML
technologies. Thatbs a compelling architecture.
My example takes a much more pragmatic approachbusing Spring Boot as the
HTTP layer and invoking XSLT from Javabbut I can see that itbs
fundamentally an imperative wrapper around what is otherwise a declarative
transformation.
Paul, your point about combining XProc pipelines with XSLT, XQuery, and other
components is especially interesting. That feels like a higher-level model
than what Ibve shown, and I can see how it would lead to a more composable
and maintainable system over time.
Alan, your observations about adoption resonate. Ibve seen similar
tendenciesbteams gravitating toward imperative languages even when
declarative approaches might be more concise or expressive. The point about
LLMs is also fascinating. If code is increasingly generated, then having a
more declarative, constrained model might actually improve clarity and
correctness.
Your suggestion about getting good declarative examples into training data is
a great one. It hadnbt occurred to me, but it makes a lot of sense.
At the moment, my goal was to create a simple, approachable path for people to
expose XSLT as a web service using widely adopted tools. But your comments
have definitely made me think about what a more declarative version of this
architecture might look like.
Thanks againbthis has given me a lot to think about.

Best,
Roger