6.4. Stylesheet Caching Revisited

We have seen two approaches that eliminate the need to hardcode the absolute pathname of XSLT stylesheets in your servlet code. In the first approach, the ServletContext was used to load resources from the web application using a relative pathname. In the second approach, the location was specified as a context initialization parameter.

This takes care of compilation changes, but now we have the issue of dynamic loading. In the PersonalDataServlet class, the two XSLT stylesheets are located and "compiled" into instances of the javax.xml.transform.Templates interface. Although this offers high performance for transformations, the two stylesheets are never flushed from memory. If changes are made to the XSLT stylesheets on disk, the servlet must be stopped and started again.