Supercharge Your Java Web Applications with Translets

SL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) enables you to transform an XML document into HTML, another XML document, or any plain text. Using XML with XSL separates the business logic data from the presentation data and allows application developers and Web designers to work independently with ease. It also simplifies application maintenance, as you can make changes to the presentation data without touching the business logic part of the application.

As simple as it sounds, doing transformation with XSL does have a drawback when done within the application: it can take a considerable amount of time and reduce performance. The time needed to parse XML and XSL documents is directly proportional to the size of the documents. Each transformation requires the XML and XSL documents to be loaded, syntax checked, and parsed. Developers can optimize all other bottlenecks in the application, but they cannot do anything to optimize XSL transformation. In the worst case, if the XSL file is loaded from a URL, it further degrades the performance of the application.