Hrm, my own insanity perhaps. I dunno... the thing itself started out as an ignorant naive hand-rolled templating system, and has grown and developed into a system that I just can't live with out and I have tried.

Whenever I try and get into the mainstream way of doing things I have nightmare flashbacks to my COBOL lessons... sorry! not sorry!

Thankfully now I have embraced the uber-awesomeness (TM) of Miyagawa's plack system, I have everything I ever wanted; my simple dynamic declaritive markup based system and blazing performance... for me I feel like I'm approaching Perl Nirvana and I can't understand at all why people don't get it.

No need to apologize (or not!) for creating something awesome .. but, as an engineer, whenever I see something new whose purpose isn't immediately obvious, I wonder why it's there. And sometimes the answer is, "Because I had an itch!"

Alex / talexb / Toronto

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

No there was no itch, I stumbled upon aXML whilst wandering in the wilderness of programming ignorance after leaving college because I was bored. It looked like a shiny pebble so I picked it up and polished it and polished it, until it shone. Now 5 years or so later, after investing a lot of time and effort, I think of it as a diamond and I would not exchange it for anything.

No classically trained computer scientist would ever conceive of doing things they way they are done in aXML, it's heretical to it's core... but it works, and it has some marvelous properties!