Author: Tonči Damjanić

Occasionally, projects are done that do not require usage of feature-rich frameworks or libraries. They usually have a short list of requirements and are built on top of simple infrastructure. Such projects are often prototypes that may become a complex system sometime in the future. But, until that happens, as a first step, a quick demo will be assembled and it needs to be as stable as possible. This post describes one possible way to go.

JavaScript developers will usually pick JSON format for server-to-client communication, but often 3rd-party services aren’t able to return anything other than XML (e.g. various RSS feeds) and the application needs to be able to deal with it. To make things more complex, the developed application may have multiple data sources with different data format, and it may need to combine them. XSLT comes in as a simple, yet powerful tool for data format normalization.