Re: Case Study: XMLC vs. Velocity

I've heard similar stories.  xmlc requires a lot of internal evangelism
since there's little supporting material.  A big part of it, I'm 
convinced, is appreciating the needs of a non-programmer designer as 
being just as important as the developer who implements the page.  That 
was what it was designed for.  My wife would call it a "control issue." :}

I'm curious if your colleagues also do xslt/xpath development and
somehow they "get that?"  I find it much more mysterious than xmlc... 
and yet it seems to be no problem for folks to make the leap between jsp 
and xslt.

David

David Corbin wrote:

> On Monday 15 September 2003 02:58, Matthew Hixson wrote:
>
> > I got a laugh out of this "case study."
> >
> > http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/casestudy2.html
> >
> > I've never used Velocity, but after working with JSP for the past 3
> > years I've come to the conclusion that it is the _wrong_ way to do web
> > development.  The biggest thing that bothers me is the lack of compile
> > time sanity checking.  JSP promised a separation of code and HTML.
> > You've gotta be kidding me if you think it accomplished its goal.  If
> > anything JSP leads to nothing but a big inconsistent, poorly
> > maintained, highly fragile, unmaintainable nightmare.  Ugh.  I'm trying
> > to get away from JSP/custom tags/Struts and move towards a servlet+XMLC
> > world.  I think life will be much nicer there.
>
>
> I couldn't agree with you more.  And I suspect of course, you'll find the same 
> from most list members.   We're using XMLC on one current project.  We used 
> it from the beginning, because I hate JSPs and like the XMLC concepts (plus 
> I'd used to before).  Both of the two other developers were willing to try 
> it.   
>
> We've built our own "widget" framework on top of XMLC, and most of the time I 
> find it very easy to slap out a re-usable UI snippet, or to just make a new 
> page.  However, I apparently am not the norm.  
>
> 13 months into the project, and now the team is 10 developers.  Nobody but me 
> likes it.  They gripe about it all the damn time.  For many programmers, it's 
> just too abstract.  With JSPs, they can "see" what's going to happen, but 
> they seem to have trouble with visualizing the DOM manipulation that's 
> occurring.   Of course, these same programmers that "see" what's happening in 
> JSPs are (in my oppinion) way to prone to copying code, too (which JSP 
> forces/encourages).


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David H. Young
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Chief Technology Officer
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