Re: [xsl] Are there things missing in XSLT which force people to use, say, Java to process XML?

[Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 29/10/2010 16:37, cknell@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Abraham Maslow said in 1966, "It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."
But actually sometimes it's better to use a sub-optimal tool than to 
invest the time to learn a new one. I know full well that I sometimes do 
things in XSLT that would be better done in Perl, so I have a lot of 
sympathy with Perl experts who do the opposite. We can't all be experts 
in everything.

I think there are two reasons people use Java when they could be using 
XSLT. One is skills-based inertia - not investing the time to learn new 
tricks. The other is architectural drift - the project starts out being 
90% things that Java is good at, and 10% XML processing, so Java is 
quite reasonably adopted; and then the balance slowly drifts, but there 
is never a good time to switch horses. The two often go together when 
you have a project full of Java developers that slowly starts doing more 
and more XML.

Michael Kay
Saxonica