Getting Started with XSLT Style Sheets and Java Servlets
By Edd Dumbill
The world of XSL is moving fast, and developers want to know how this technology can benefit them. The XSL Transformations (XSLT) Working Draft has been evolving for the past year and has now reached a point of near stability. There are already several XSLT processors available, all in development in parallel with the Working Draft.
We're already seeing XML capabilities built in to application and database servers, and it won't be long before XSL capabilities will be part of these products. Because XSL is such a new specification, versions built in to server products often lag behind progress in the specification: As an example, the XSL standard, at the time of publication, is significantly changed from the version incorporated into Microsoft's IE5, and no longer compatible with Microsoft XSL.
However, it's not that hard to "roll your own" XSL-based Web server, and you'll gain some valuable experience with XSL and servlets while you're at it. This article assumes you have a basic familiarity with Java, XML, and XSLT.
The combination of XML and XSLT is a powerful one. Documents can be created in XML, and the HTML presentation can be derived automatically from the original data. This mechanism gives you all the advantages associated with separating presentation from content, notably an easily changeable appearance, and preservation of the original structured content.
However, you could accomplish this with Make and Perl, and indeed some developers have been doing it this way for several years.
