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Forgive my ignorance, but I inherited a wad of xslt fairly recently, and it seems frustrating and verbose to me. What do you like about it? Can you point me to

Forgive my ignorance, but I inherited a wad of xslt fairly recently, and it seems frustrating and verbose to me. What do you like about it? Can you point me to some examples of good code?

arethuza 13y ago
One thing about XSLT is that when it is bad it is really really bad. It can be fairly elegant, especially if you know the difference between apply-templates and call-template and are happy with all of the feature of XPath. But I suspect that is fairly rare....
T-hawk 13y ago
XSLT is a purely functional language so inherits much of the general set of likes/dislikes that go with them. <xsl:if test="x">template</xsl:test> is basically this in Lisp: (if eval(x) (apply-template template) nil) And <xsl:for-each> is equivalent to map in Lisp. It's a functional projection, not an imperative loop, even if the syntax looks like that of an imperative language. Functional purity gives you the usual advantages: execution that can be testable and fast and parallelizable and predictable in space and time usage and secure in presenting little attack surface for injections and overflows and such. XSLT is exactly what it claims to be, a declarative way of transforming tree structures. The problem with XSLT in enterprise land is that real world business requirements don't fit well into that. Real world applications involve things like iteratively computed subtotals or comparing separate records together or picking up user preferences for formatting or other sorts of conditional logic. All of which is a poor fit for XSLT and leads to really complicated XPath hacks. And your average enterprisey programmer comes from imperative languages and thinks and codes in imperative terms, often not even realizing XSLT is a functional language. So it's no surprise that real-world XSLT ends up as muddy balls of crap.
- happimess 13y ago
  That was very informative, thanks.

Forgive my ignorance, but I inherited a wad of xslt fairly recently, and it seems frustrating and verbose to me. What do you like about it? Can you point me to some examples of good code?

arethuza 13y ago

One thing about XSLT is that when it is bad it is really really bad. It can be fairly elegant, especially if you know the difference between apply-templates and call-template and are happy with all of the feature of XPath. But I suspect that is fairly rare....

T-hawk 13y ago

XSLT is a purely functional language so inherits much of the general set of likes/dislikes that go with them. <xsl:if test="x">template</xsl:test> is basically this in Lisp: (if eval(x) (apply-template template) nil) And <xsl:for-each> is equivalent to map in Lisp. It's a functional projection, not an imperative loop, even if the syntax looks like that of an imperative language. Functional purity gives you the usual advantages: execution that can be testable and fast and parallelizable and predictable in space and time usage and secure in presenting little attack surface for injections and overflows and such. XSLT is exactly what it claims to be, a declarative way of transforming tree structures. The problem with XSLT in enterprise land is that real world business requirements don't fit well into that. Real world applications involve things like iteratively computed subtotals or comparing separate records together or picking up user preferences for formatting or other sorts of conditional logic. All of which is a poor fit for XSLT and leads to really complicated XPath hacks. And your average enterprisey programmer comes from imperative languages and thinks and codes in imperative terms, often not even realizing XSLT is a functional language. So it's no surprise that real-world XSLT ends up as muddy balls of crap.

happimess 13y ago
That was very informative, thanks.