Implementing Dynamic Web Interfaces Using XSLT

Web applications are dynamic- many requiring unique content and interfaces for each user. There are a myriad of ways to take user content out of a database and present it in a browser. This article is for IT management and development staff and it focuses on the different ways web applications can display dynamic content in ASP.Net, why we chose XSLT to for our own product, and finally a look at our technical implementation.

Planning for Dynamic Content

Whether you are in the process of building a new business web application or planning to build one, you most likely need to address how your web application will handle displaying different content for different users.

Considerations

When considering the different options for displaying dynamic content you generally need to take into account the following aspects:

Usability

Usability might be one of the most critical aspects in the success (or lack thereof) of your application.

Development Time

This includes the total amount of development time involved in satisfying your current application requirements.

Flexibility

Regardless of how comprehensive your current requirements are, applications tend to evolve over time. It’s important to evaluate the development effort and skill sets required to accommodate changes.

Support, Maintenance & Ongoing Enhancements

Commonly ignored by many when planning new development projects, it is generally responsible for a good chunk of the total cost of an application over the span of its life. This includes bug fixes, client customizations, minor application enhancements and of course, QA and testing.

The Options in ASP.Net

Generally web applications that use ASP.Net have two main options for displaying dynamic content:

Server Controls

With Binding – retrieving the relevant data and binding it to the appropriate ASP.Net server controls on a web form

In Code – populating the appropriate ASP.Net server controls in code

HTML

In Code – constructing the HTML to display in code based on the information retrieved from the database

Using XSLT – retrieving the database information in XML format and then transforming it into HTML with XSLT

A third option is Silverlight, a relatively young technology introduced as an option for web applications by Microsoft about a year ago. Silverlight provides a very rich GUI with the power of the .Net platform (a subset, actually) and tools that make web application development quite similar to the latest Windows application development (WDF).

Source by Gil Shabat - aspalliance.com