The Lurker

Nobody who matters uses XSLT any more

XML, says Clemens Vasters, is the assembly language of Web 2.0:

By now, XML is the foundation for everything that happens on the web, and I surely don't want to have it go away. But have arrived at the point where matters have gotten so complicated that a layer of abstraction over pretty much all things XML has become a necessity for everyone who makes their money building customer solutions and not by teaching or writing about XML. In my last session at TechEd, I asked a room of about 200 people "Who of you hand-writes XSLT transforms?" 4 hands. "Who of you used to hand-write XSLT transforms?" 40+ hands. I think it's safe to assume that a bunch of those folks who have sworn off masochism and no longer hand-code XSLT are now using tools like the BizTalk Mapper or Altova's MapForce, which means that XSL/T is alive and kicking, but only downstairs in the basement. However, the abstractions that these tools provide also allow bypassing XSLT altogether and generate the transformation logic straight into compiled C++, Java, or C# code, which is what MapForce offers. WSDL is already walking down that path.

(my emphasis)

The polite way of putting my response is to claim selection bias. In other words, I argue that the 40-to-4 reduction in XSLT users doesn't say as much the popularity of XSLT as it does the people who would find themselves in a conference session on WS-Deathstar (...though I really do hate finding myself linking to that smug Ruby on Rails guy, DDT). Especially since over three quarters of the people in the room had evidently never seriously used XSLT in the first place.

Related topics: Rants Web