RE: XSLT Consulting Market?

> From: Adam Turoff [mailto:ziggy@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2003 8:03 AM
> Subject: Re:  XSLT Consulting Market?
> 
> On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 07:28:50PM -0800, hnorris norris wrote:
> > Is there much of a demand for high
> > level XSLT development these days?
> 
> It depends on what you mean by "high level XSLT development".  :-)
> 
> The very nature of XSLT development is vastly different than,
> say, Java development.  While some shops may use XSLT extensively,
> I doubt that you'll ever see very many XSLT equivalents of the
> canonical 100,000 line Java enterprise system.

. . . unless you work here, that is; then you get both.  ;-)

I haven't done an actual line count, but our XSLT codebase approaches 700
files, although nearly 300 are highly redundant stylesheets converted from
static HTML.  These, I hope, will go away soon once we migrate our airport
lookup content to XML.

Still, I don't think it's a stretch to estimate our total lines of code at
~150K.  And this is all for one output type (HTML).  And this is just for
the presentation of our consumer Web sites.  Our internal admin and b-to-b
tools use even more XSLT.

I would agree though that we're freaks of technology and that few shops seem
to use XSLT on this scale.

> Companies that are using XSLT extensively tend to use a small number
> of XML vocabularies (1 to 3) and generate a variety of outputs.
> Alternatively, they may deal with a variety of inputs and normalize
> that to a smaller number of output vocabularies.  This 
> reduces the need
> to have a team of 50 dedicated XSLT programmers.

That's similar to our situation here.  Our data comes from a variety of
sources: structured data from a GDS, database, flat files, etc.  That all
gets formatted into XML and output as HTML.  Dealing with one output type
does help simplify things, but we *do* need a lot of formatters.  (That's
why we have 30 Java programmers and only 3 XSLT programmers.)

cheers,
b.

| brian martinez                              brian.martinez@xxxxxxxx |
| lead gui programmer                                    303.708.7248 |
| trip network, inc.                                 fax 303.790.9350 |
| 6436 s. racine cir.                             englewood, co 80111 |
| http://www.cheaptickets.com/                   http://www.trip.com/ |

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