Is XSLT worth it? [closed]

Question

A while ago, I started on a project where I designed a html-esque XML schema so that authors could write their content (educational course material) in a simplified format which would then be transformed into HTML via XSLT. I played around (struggled) with it for a while and got it to a very basic level but then was too annoyed by the limitations I was encountering (which may well have been limitations of my knowledge) and when I read a blog suggesting to ditch XSLT and just write your own XML-to-whatever parser in your language of choice, I eagerly jumped onto that and it's worked out brilliantly.

I'm still working on it to this day (I'm actually supposed to be working on it right now, instead of playing on SO), and I am seeing more and more things which make me think that the decision to ditch XSLT was a good one.

I know that XSLT has its place, in that it is an accepted standard, and that if everyone is writing their own interpreters, 90% of them will end up on TheDailyWTF. But given that it is a functional style language instead of the procedural style which most programmers are familiar with, for someone embarking on a project such as my own, would you recommend they go down the path that I did, or stick it out with XSLT?

Answer 1

The XSLT specification defines XSLT as "a language for transforming XML documents into other XML documents". If you are trying to do any thing but the most basic data processing within XSLT there are probably better solutions.

Also worth noting that the data processing capabilities of XSLT can be extended in .NET using custom extension functions:

• MSDN Documentation
• CSharpFriends: Tutorial

Answer 2

I'm currently tasked with scraping data from a public site (yeah, i know). Thankfully it conforms to xhtml so I'm able to use xslt to gather the data I need. The resulting solution is readable, clean and easy to change if need occurs. Perfect!

Answer 3

I have found XSLT to be quite difficult to work with.

I have had experience working on a system somewhat similar to the one you describe. My company noted that the data we were returning from "the middle tier" was in XML, and that the pages were to be rendered in HTML which might as well be XHTML, plus they'd heard that XSL was a standard for transforming between XML formats. So the "architects" (by which I mean people who think deep design thoughts but apparently never code) decided that our front tier would be implemented by writing XSLT scripts that transformed the data into the XHTML for display.

The choice turned out to be disastrous. XSLT, it turns out, is a pain to write. And so all of our pages were difficult to write and to maintain. We would have done much better to have used JSP (this was in Java) or some similar approach that used one kind of markup (angle brackets) for the output format (the HTML) and another kind of markup (like <%...%>) for the meta-data. The most confusing thing about XSLT is that it is written in XML, and it translates from XML to XML... it is quite difficult to keep all 3 different XML documents straight in one's mind.

Your situation is slightly different: instead of authoring each page in XSLT as I did, you only need to write ONE bit of code in XSLT (the code to convert from templates to display). But it sounds like you may have run into the same kind of difficulty that I did. I would say that trying to interpret a simple XML-based DSL (domain specific language) like you are doing is NOT one of the strong points of XSLT. (Although it CAN do the job... after all, it IS Turing complete!)

However, if what you had was simpler: you have data in one XML format and wanted to make simple alterations to it -- not a full page-description DSL, but some simple straightforward modifications, then XSLT is an excellent tool for that purpose. It's declarative (not procedural) nature is actually an advantage for that purpose.

-- Michael Chermside

Answer 4

To answer your three questions:

1. I've used XSLT once some years ago.
2. I do believe XSLT could be the right solution in certain circumstances. (Never say never)
3. I tend to agree with your assesment that it is mostly useful for 'simple' transformations. But I think as long as you understand XSLT well, there is a case to be made for using it for bigger tasks like publishing a website as XML transformed into HTML.

I believe the reason many developers dislike XSLT is because they do not understand the fundamentally different paradigm it is based on. But with the recent interest in functional programming we might see XSLT making a comeback...

Answer 5

I have to admit a bias here because I teach XSLT for a living. But, it might be worth covering off the areas that I see my students working in. They split into three groups generally: publishing, banking and web.

Many of the answers so far could be summarised as "it's no good for creating websites" or "it's nothing like language X". Many tech folks go through their careers with no exposure to functional/declarative languages. When I'm teaching, the experienced Java/VB/C/etc folk are the ones who have issues with the language (variables are variables in the sense of algebra not procedural programming for example). That's many of the people answering here - I've never gotten on with Java but I'm not going to bother to critique the language because of that.

In many circumstances it is an inappropriate tool for creating websites - a general purpose programming language may be better. I often need to take very large XML documents and present them on the web; XSLT makes that trivial. The students I see in this space tend to be processing data sets and presenting them on the web. XSLT is certainly not the only applicable tool in this space. However, many of them are using the DOM to do this and XSLT is certainly less painful.

The banking students I see use a DataPower box in general. This is an XML appliance and it's used to sit between services 'speaking' different XML dialects. Transformation from one XML language to another is almost trivial in XSLT and the number of students attending my courses on this are increasing.

The final set of students I see come from a publishing background (like me). These people tend to have immense documents in XML (believe me, publishing as an industry is getting very into XML - technical publishing has been there for years and trade publishing is getting there now). These documents need to be processing (DocBook to ePub comes to mind here).

Someone above commented that scripts tend to be below 60 lines or they become unwieldy. If it does become unwieldy, the odds are the coder hasn't really got the idea - XSLT is a very different mindset from many other languages. If you don't get the mindset it won't work.

It's certainly not a dying language (the amount of work I get tells me that). Right now, it's a bit 'stuck' until Microsoft finish their (very late) implementation of XSLT 2. But it's still there and seems to be going strong from my viewpoint.

Answer 6

So much negativity!

I've been using XSLT for a good few years now, and genuinely love it. The key thing you have to realise is that it's not a programming language it's a templating language (and in this respect I find it indescribably superior to asp.net /spit).

XML is the de facto data format of web development today, be it config files, raw data or in memory reprsentation. XSLT and XPath give you an enormously powerful and very efficient way to transform that data into any output format you might like, instantly giving you that MVC aspect of separating the presentation from the data.

Then there's the utility abilities: washing out namespaces, recognising disparate schema definitions, merging documents.

It must be better to deal with XSLT than developing your own in-house methods. At least XSLT is a standard and something you could hire for, and if it's ever really a problem for your team it's very nature would let you keep most of your team working with just XML.

A real world use case: I just wrote an app which handles in-memory XML docs throughout the system, and transforms to JSON, HTML, or XML as requested by the end user. I had a fairly random request to provide as Excel data. A former colleague had done something similar programatically but it required a module of a few class files and that the server had MS Office installed! Turns out Excel has an XSD: new functionality with minimum basecode impact in 3 hours.

Personally I think it's one of the cleanest things I've encountered in my career, and I believe all of it's apparent issues (debugging, string manipulation, programming structures) are down to a flawed understanding of the tool.

Obviously, I strongly believe it is "worth it".