[xsl] newbie Q: xsl file as top-level webapp controller

["Kucera, Rich" <kucerar@xxxxxxxx>]

Anybody out there doing this?  Nobody seems to have heard of this.  I have
to maintain a suite of web apps, and the top-level declarative and executed
application control is just the thing I've been looking for:

browser -> httprequest -> 2XML -> pageflow.xsl -> forward-or-2html ->
browser
                                  ^             ^
                                    optional process input(uploads etc)

pageflow.xsl would sit at the top-level of the web application,  and also
possibly embed presentation elements and application data directly in the
stylesheet.   This seems like a compression that would speed up development,
any reason why I shouldn't make this a practice?  (I've already done a
prototype...)

Background:

In the j2EE world what we're going to end up with shortly is the pageflow
standards for top-level organization of web apps,  which is better than
nothing (we currently have nothing at top level,  unless you find some way
of using an available MVC controller which expresses a declarative top-level
structure,  however they don't appear to focus on this problem).    The
pageflow standards embeds and distributes controller functionality in
comments throughout source code is then requires a special compiler to build
the controller.  The vendors are providing visual tools to handle all this.
So,   this presents a few problems--you need the special compilers,  you
can't easily extract summary information from the presumably complex
controller rules since it's buried in comments in a programming language,
you're dependent on the vendor to implement every report on the controller
rules you could possibly want,  the visual channel is very narrow,
application is embedded in technology environment that requires the special
compiler, etc.  

Seems like pageflow.xsl would provide all that is needed,  and it would be
centralized information,  and you could process the xsl with xsl to extract
any kind of info you wanted pertaining to the app.  For performance,
pageflow could be compiled into a classfile,    or cached in some way,  I
guess.

Thanks


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