Can I get some constructive feedback about the following architecture?
Simplified Architecture Summary:
Return XML from your SQL Server (using FOR XML) and pass it straight into a XSL transform to produce a rich HTML web site.
What are the pro’s and con’s of such a system when compared with a conventional 3-tier ASP.NET architecture?
We have done something like this. And it works for very simple pages. But as soon as you would like to include some client side javascript and similar, you are doomed.
The generated output is hidden in the XSLT stylesheets and it is very hard to read, maintain and fix bugs.
Testing can be done, but also with much more effort than before.
The MVC pattern and similar is much better suited for such a scenario.