Several old Devs gathered around a poorly lit table in a run down bar near the edge of the Wastelands.
With a voice that speaks of the scars of long fought battles one Dev breaks the silence: "There were... programming languages written in XML. You had things like <If condition="something"> ... </if>"
The Dev begins to sob and retract into a fetal position as they mumble something about function returns and binary interface layers. The rest just pour themselves another round.
@jrconlin I may be harming myself here, but JSTL (JSP Standard Template Library) was an example, and given what the alternative was at that time, it was kinda refreshing. You only used it to handle view logic, getting "beans" from the "actual business layer code". The "language-as-xml" code was just to render HTML.
The alternative had been a mix of c-line languages hidden in <? ?> tags mixed with HTML. That was a nightmare.
The other was ColdFusion that I think initially lacked the separation view / business layer and that would be a bit more of a nightmare. Once the Enterprise Java spec came with the taglibs, ColdFusion could more or less be written as a JSP taglib, and that is the path it took, and got the same separation possibility. That all got bought by Macromedia or something. The flash people. Evil stuff.
It was not as cool as doing REST calls from the browser and just doing everything in the client, but that was not a thing at that point :P
@jrconlin I may be harming myself here, but JSTL (JSP Standard Template Library) was an example, and given what the alternative was at that time, it was kinda refreshing. You only used it to handle view logic, getting "beans" from the "actual business layer code". The "language-as-xml" code was just to render HTML.