Re: Case Study: XMLC vs. Velocity

On Monday 15 September 2003 10:38, David H. Young wrote:
Well, in our shop, the designer happens to be a programmer too.  In that 
sense, we're not taking full advantage of XMLC :) 

One developer that griped (he's not on this project anymore) is an XPath, but 
not XSLT guy (some of the time).  He just thinks it's too disconnected when 
compared to JSP.  All the other developers, as far as I know are not 
XSLT/XPath people.  

But, I agree with you that xslt is hard to wrangle with.

> 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).

-- 
David Corbin <dcorbin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>