Comparison of JavaServer pages and XSLT: a software engineering perspective

  • Authors:

  • Jürgen Dunkel;Ralf Bruns;Andreas Holitschke

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover, Department of Computer Science, Ricklinger Stadtweg 120, D-30459 Hannover, Germany;University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover, Department of Computer Science, Ricklinger Stadtweg 120, D-30459 Hannover, Germany;University of Applied Sciences and Arts Hannover, Department of Computer Science, Ricklinger Stadtweg 120, D-30459 Hannover, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Software—Practice & Experience
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Professional Web applications present their content and services by means of dynamically generated Web pages to the user--normally HTML pages. Basically, there are two different technologies available for dynamic Web page generation--JavaServer Pages and XML/XSLT. In this paper the alternative technologies are compared from a software engineering perspective.The basic concepts of JavaServer Pages and XML/XSLT are briefly explained with respect to Web page generation. A universal software architecture of the server side presentation tier is introduced and it is shown how both technologies fit into the universal architecture. Its fundamental idea is the clear separation of concerns according to the well-established model-view-controller design pattern. The proposed architecture has proven its applicability in several enterprise applications. The main part of the paper deals with the comparison of JavaServer Pages and XML/XSLT. Quality criteria well-established in software engineering practice are discussed with respect to JavaServer Pages and XML/XSLT, e.g. maintainability, extensibility, reusability, efficiency, portability, integration of methods and tools. The main emphasis is laid on the support of the model-view-controller pattern, since it is the most established design principle for user interface design.