Date: Mar. 27, 2001
Link: http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2001/02/22/jsp_servlets.html
Source Author or Organization: Sue Spielman, O'Reilly Network, ONJava.com

In this article, which is part of the series JSP and Servlets, the author compares a technology growing in usage, Extensible Server Pages, with the Java Server Pages (JSP) approach to serving dynamic content.

XSP is one of the core technologies of Cocoon, a major component of the Apache XML Project. The author examines the object models of the two technologies in detail, and compares the results of applying each to the generation of three types of pages commonly developed with XSP or JSP.

JSP is well understood and deployed, and what developers already know is a major consideration when ramping up for a large development effort. In this kind of application, or when trying to get a project out the door expeditiously, JSP may be a better solution. XSP delivers the best method yet for clean separation of presentation from content. This is a labor and time saver on any project, allowing teams or individuals to concentrate on a specialty and process in parallel, but it's especially important when developing XML applications. JSP is powerful and has made major strides towards, but hasn't completely realized, that separation. Like HTML, it will still mix data with presentation.

XSP and its surrounding framework, which relies heavily on Extensible Style Language Transformations (XSLT) stylesheets for the presentation layer, present the best solution when advantages of that separation and/or keeping development teams well defined are important.