CODEWITHSUNDEEP
javahtmlxmlparsingxslt
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Reputation: 9103

Alternative to XSLT?

on my project I have a huuuuge XSLT used to convert some XML files to HTML. The problem is that this file is growing up day by day, it's hard to read, debug and test. So I was thinking about moving all the parsing process to Java.

Do you think is a good idea? In case what libraries to parse XML and generate HTML(XML) do u suggest? performances will be better or worse?

If it's not a good idea any alternative idea?

Thanks

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Upvotes: 5

Views: 5709

Answers (3)

duffymo
duffymo

Reputation: 308743

I'd consider Velocity as an alternative. I prefer it to XSL-T. The transforms are harder to write than templates, because the latter look exactly like the XML I wish to produce. It's a simple thing to add in the markup to map in the data.

Upvotes: 2

Michael Kay
Michael Kay

Reputation: 163262

I once had a client with a similar problem - thousands of lines of XSLT, growing all the time. I spent an hour reading it with increasing incredulity, then rewrote it in 20 lines of XSLT.

Refactoring is often a good idea, and the worse the code is, the more worthwhile refactoring is. But there's no reason to believe that just because the code is bad and in need of refactoring, you need to change to a different programming language. XST is actually very good at handling variety and complexity if you know how to use it properly.

It's possible that the code is an accumulation of special handling of special cases, and each new special case discovered results in more rules being added. That's a tough problem to tackle in any language, but XSLT can deal with it better than most, provided you apply your mind all the time to finding abstract general rules that encompass all the special rules, so you only need to code the special rules as exceptions.

Upvotes: 2

SK-logic
SK-logic

Reputation: 9714

Take a look at CDuce - it is a strictly typed, statically compiled XML processing language.

Upvotes: 2

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