In defense of DVSL and XSLT

[James Taylor <jt...@4lane.com>]

> Granted: I use XSLT and am able to live with it. Nothing to be ashamed
> of, I guess. I've briefly looked into DVSL when Maven was gathering
> momentum, and it was not the kind of quantum-leap technology that would
> change my judgement on XSLT.

As a user and supporter of both, I just want to point out that DVSL and
XSLT have different strengths. DVSL is declarative like XSLT, but it
generates text rather than a node graph. Therefore DVSL lacks some of
the cool features of XSLT like xsl:attribute-set, xsl:copy, and others.

However DVSL is much better at accessing beans. It's just velocity, so
you push whatever you want onto the context and go. Much easier than
dealing with extension functions. 

I personally have found uses for both. You may notice that for print
documentation in maven we are using XSLT rather than DVSL. At that point
all the generated documents and user documents are in the same
intermediate format and no further access to java objects is necessary.
However when generating the intermediate documents (or generating code
and build files for maven itself) DVSL is much easier.

-- jt



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Re: In defense of DVSL and XSLT

[Daniel Rall <dl...@finemaltcoding.com>]

James Taylor <jt...@4lane.com> writes:

> I personally have found uses for both. You may notice that for print
> documentation in maven we are using XSLT rather than DVSL. At that point
> all the generated documents and user documents are in the same
> intermediate format and no further access to java objects is necessary.
> However when generating the intermediate documents (or generating code
> and build files for maven itself) DVSL is much easier.

Exactly.  Use the right tool for the job.

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