in reply to perl/XML development

dda

"Say, does it make sense to prepare XML file, use it as a template, and then apply some transformation to it to convert it to HTML? Any advice is welcome."

A lot depends on the scale of the project, but we achived quite a lot with a CGI/XSLT combination, like you suggest. I would not recommend this approach for larger projects, but Matts excellent AxKit looks very good.

What we did was to use XML to communicate with a backend SAP system. The SAP system spoke in XML, so the CGI application used XML to speak with the SAP system. The applaction used the XML::LibXML module to manipulate input/output XML and then used XML::LibXSLT to convert XML to HTML.

If you like XML/XSLT then this is a nice way of doing things, and the we used Perl to feed things into and extract things from the XML before we transform it.

The application has been running now with multiple users for about 4 months, and on a 1Gz Linux box, it seems to perform quite well. We've not pushed it yet to find out how many simultaneous users it can deal with, but if we wanted a big system we'd have written it in mod_Perl, and probably used AxKit.

Update: Minor corrections.


--
ajt

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Re: Re: perl/XML development
by dda (Friar) on Sep 05, 2002 at 13:50 UTC
    Thanks for your reply. I looked at cocoon's .xsp files with <esql:..> tags, and now I'm thinking how to implement the same with perl. I.e. I'd like to be able to use some kind of logic (like <xsp:logic>) to fetch and manipulate the data in XML before applying style to it.

    I'm thinking about some mix of Text::Template module (I used it some time ago) and XML templates. May be I'm re-inventing the wheel? May be some sort of XML::Template module exists?

    Basically, I'd like it to be standalone. I do not want any specific environment, like modperl. Do I want too much? :)

    --dda

[reply]

      You realise that AxKit supports XSP taglibs? Even if you don't want to use AxKit/mod_perl you might be able to steal some useful code from there.

[reply]

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