From: Adam Turoff [mailto:ziggy(_at_)panix(_dot_)com]
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2003 8:03 AM
Subject: Re: [xsl] XSLT Consulting Market?
On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 07:28:50PM -0800, hnorris norris wrote:
Is there much of a demand for high
level XSLT development these days?
It depends on what you mean by "high level XSLT development". :-)
The very nature of XSLT development is vastly different than,
say, Java development. While some shops may use XSLT extensively,
I doubt that you'll ever see very many XSLT equivalents of the
canonical 100,000 line Java enterprise system.
. . . unless you work here, that is; then you get both. ;-)
I haven't done an actual line count, but our XSLT codebase approaches 700
files, although nearly 300 are highly redundant stylesheets converted from
static HTML. These, I hope, will go away soon once we migrate our airport
lookup content to XML.
Still, I don't think it's a stretch to estimate our total lines of code at
~150K. And this is all for one output type (HTML). And this is just for
the presentation of our consumer Web sites. Our internal admin and b-to-b
tools use even more XSLT.
I would agree though that we're freaks of technology and that few shops seem
to use XSLT on this scale.
Companies that are using XSLT extensively tend to use a small number
of XML vocabularies (1 to 3) and generate a variety of outputs.
Alternatively, they may deal with a variety of inputs and normalize
that to a smaller number of output vocabularies. This
reduces the need
to have a team of 50 dedicated XSLT programmers.
That's similar to our situation here. Our data comes from a variety of
sources: structured data from a GDS, database, flat files, etc. That all
gets formatted into XML and output as HTML. Dealing with one output type
does help simplify things, but we *do* need a lot of formatters. (That's
why we have 30 Java programmers and only 3 XSLT programmers.)
cheers,
b.
| brian martinez
brian(_dot_)martinez(_at_)trip(_dot_)com |
| lead gui programmer 303.708.7248 |
| trip network, inc. fax 303.790.9350 |
| 6436 s. racine cir. englewood, co 80111 |
| http://www.cheaptickets.com/ http://www.trip.com/ |
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