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Re: Relationship between XSLT and ASP (was Re: asp problem)
- To: xsl-list at mulberrytech dot com
- Subject: Re: Relationship between XSLT and ASP (was Re: asp problem)
- From: Paul Tchistopolskii <paul at qub dot com>
- Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 19:33:44 -0800
- Organization: The Qub Group
- References: <20000229204012.53755.qmail@hotmail.com>
- Reply-To: xsl-list at mulberrytech dot com
> 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 shit-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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