Comment by radicalbyte
11 years ago
The problem is that it's often misused. Using an XSLT that takes 0.5s to run to transform some XML to HTML during web requests on a busy site? Idiotic.
Using it for async transformations - html to pdf, customer message format to your message format. Fine.
The problem is not that it is misused. The problem is that there is a small subset of problems for which it works passably (like many other technologies) and a large universe of problems for which it will cause you massive pain.
Using compiled XSLT-translets in Java (XSLTC) has a huge impact on performance, with transformations taking 0.5s the problem seems to be in the way your XSLT is written and pushing or pulling the data, not XSLT itself: http://xalan.apache.org/old/xalan-j/xsltc_usage.html
Compiled XSLT stylesheets must be very efficient; they're automata, like regular expressions.