[xsl] XSL vs. Parsing/Filling and Reading from an Object

["Katie McNally" <kmcnally9@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

We are trying to decide which approach to use to create new pages for the 
site we are building.  The current approach for the existing pages involves 
a servlet calling a session bean, which sends an XML request to a 3rd party 
vendor, which returns XML.  The session bean parses the xml into a hashtable 
and then passes the hashtable back to the servlet.  The servlet puts the 
data from the hashtable into an object, and the object is placed in the 
session.  The jsp then retrieves the object from the session to build the 
page presented to the user.

We are considering an XSL approach (using the Xalan processor) to transform 
the XML returned by the 3rd party vendor.  The things we are considering for 
our decision are performance, time-to-build and complexity of page 
maintenance/creation of future pages (the current pages are read-only, but 
future pages may be transactional/editable).  The pages currently being 
designed will involve the retrieval of XML about 35 KB in size (although 
future pages may require the retrieval of XML greater in size).  The logic 
necessary to create the read-only pages is medium in complexity, but future 
pages may require greater complexity.

If you have any suggestions/input on either approach, I would appreciate it. 
 Let me know if I need to provide additional information.

Thanks, Katie

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