Preferred tool for folding XML into HTML

Cameron Laird claird at starbase.neosoft.com
Tue Jan 8 10:14:13 EST 2002


In article <3C3AC601.9B33BC5E at engcorp.com>,
Peter Hansen  <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
>Laurent Szyster wrote:
			.
			.
			.
>> By the way, I advise you to pick wathever XSLT engine available
>> on your platform and pipe the XML into it from Python. An XSLT
>> engine written in Python is a non-sense. Providing Python binding
>> to an XSLT library is *The Right Thing* to do.
>
>Why ever would you say this?  Surely, except _possibly_ for reasons 
>of performance, there is no logic in the above statement.  
>
>And if performance is thought to be the issue, wouldn't one need to
>have actual minimum performance requirements in mind, and to measure
>the performance of a Python solution and determine that it is 
>inadequate, before one could say using Python is nonsense?
>
>-Peter Hansen, P.Eng.

I'm also curious about Mr. Szyster's claim, Peter.
I can imagine a desire "to be standard" might fur-
ther motivate it; there are XSLT engines that have
much greater market share than any Python-coded one,
and something like Xalan might--might--track changes
in the standard specification more quickly than the
4Suite implementation.

My own experience is that Py-coded XSLT is over two
orders of magnitude slower than other readily-
available engines.  While I entirely agree with your
(repeated) observation that performance matters only
in relation to requirement, a factor of hundred
often matters in the work I do.
-- 

Cameron Laird <Cameron at Lairds.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html



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