I read this article a while ago, and became intrigued with the technology.

It is good for separation of data and presentation, but on the other hand, they’re never totally separate. Whenever I need to add something new to our UI, I almost always have to go in and change the XML I’m outputting as well. Though for more superficial changes (like rearranging the layout) it’s true, I don’t have to touch the XML at all.

Anyway, it often seems like a lot of overhead for what it is. I mean, we’re handling our data in Java, but then in the Java code we create XML documents, and then we run the XSL over those documents. It seems a lot more direct just to use JSPs to directly access the data in the Java objects, without having to convert it to something else and process the data yet again to display it.

It’s a good skill to have, and it’s interesting to learn, since it’s so different than JSP/ASP/PHP or Java/C++/Perl. But I’m not sure it really saves you that much.

It’s all very interesting. I’d like to learn more JSP/Java - and all that stuff.