Re: Relationship between XSLT and ASP (was Re: asp problem)

> In the latest MSXSL technology preview, they provide an XSLT ISAPI extension 
> for a web server: 
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/webtechnology/xml/xslisapi.asp which 
> essentially makes XSLT the server-side "ASP" technology.
> 
> I think that XSLT could be a really [expletive deleted]-kicking server-side scripting 
> language- especially once MS allows us to get XML streams directly into the 
> XSLT engine from ADO recordsets or from SQL Server 2000 queries. This will 
> allow direct transforms of XML streams into relevant HTML for down-level 
> browsers, or filter-through schema conversion types of transformations as 
> well.

XSLT is bad server-side scripting language.

1. it is verbose, 
2. it makes problems to extensions because of "no side-effects" rule.
3. "no side-effects" rule also forces memory / execution overhead 
with "do it twice" functional workarounds.
4. It lacks streaming, that means every incoming stream of XML events 
should get accumulated into DOM-alike structure before starting 
processing, that also forces memory accolactions / deallocations 
again and that means  "you'l better to filter / sort / group on the 
level of SQL server, but not on the level of XSLT" 

e t.c.

But.
 
XSLT is perfect for the things it has been designed: rendering documents.

That means it supports very clear separation of  data layer from 
presentation layer. 

The next version of PXSLServlet will show how this concept could be 
used on practice, developing inteactive weblication backed by SQL server. 

Current  version of PXSLServlet ( http://www.pault.com/Pxsl/ )
gives some example of using XSLT with SQL. It is just a 
technology preview. However,  the basic concept is already there, 
it is just now much better and I wish I'l find some time to publish 
version 0.3 ( with complete source code ) next 2 weeks.

Rgds.Paul.



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