Why Use XSLT in Server Side Web Frameworks For Output Generation?

Just as web developers want to use standards on the client side, standards such as XSLT on the server side may be an efficient way to create good quality markup and other web output.

It can help avoid the hard coded or hard to edit HTML strings that are often seen in server side templates and scripts.

As an open standard, XSLT is reasonably universal, and skills can be easily transferable.

Some people don’t like it or have had bad experiences with it in the past.

But it can be a very powerful tool in the developer’s toolbox. Perhaps it is worth giving it another look?

This article looks at why XSLT could be useful as part of the View in an Model-View-Controller pattern, its benefits and potential drawbacks. Continue reading

PHP 5.3 Gets A Bit More Object Oriented And More

PHP 5 in general has been a good improvement over PHP 4, but those used to full blown object oriented program languages such as Java or C# may find some OO features still lacking in PHP 5.

PHP 5 has the usual things, such as classes, interfaces, abstract classes, inheritance, etc, but some useful programming constructs have been missing, though PHP 6, under development, aims to rectify that.

However, it seems that many of those features are going to be brought forward to the up-coming PHP 5.3 (which may make it more likely that it will get installed by web hosting companies sooner than they would likely go for PHP 6).

Sitepoint has an excellent summary of the features. The list of features include: Continue reading