The keys things about XSLT are that it exists and it works: it's better than nothing. I agree it's horrible to use e.g. "if (i<10)" are you kidding me? Thou

The keys things about XSLT are that it exists and it works: it's better than nothing. I agree it's horrible to use e.g. "if (i<10)" are you kidding me? Though, many people use a graphical front end to generate it these days (mapforce, biztalk mapper, stylus studio, IBM and Oracle have their own - there's even a free one with an online demo http://jamper.sourceforge.net/ http://jamper.sourceforge.net/). I think several healthy businesses supplying a GUI for XSLT suggests two things: 1. there's a need for what XSLT does; and 2. XSLT sucks Of course, it could be that GUIs indicate a kind of disruption - making a difficult technology simpler to use, and therefore accessible by less-skilled people (or skilled people with less time). The potential disruptees are the XSLT experts (who in turn displaced people who wrote manual transformers, before XSLT). Having said all that: there isn't anything comparable for JSON. And yet, communication between different apps - or even communication between different versions of the same app - is pretty much a given.