James Owens wrote:
I anticipate working with XML and XSL a lot over the next few years (I'm
in technical documentation). I also happen to be looking for a new
scripting language for some CGI interfaces I'll be setting up on our
in-house library. Currently I use REXX for my scripting needs, but I
understand that Python and Perl are popular for XML work, and I know that
Perl is popular for CGI.
At the risk of starting some kind of religious war, which one should I
learn? Is there another choice I should know about?
Python is my preference over Perl. Its a pleasure to work with.
Where xslt seems under-powered or awkward, I normally work with Python,
which provides a comforfable front-end to several xml parsers. It also
has built-in unicode support.
However, it was when I first got 'Cocoon' working that the whole
xml thing suddenly made sense to me. It is my choice when the
main task can be achieved with xslt or a sequence of xslt
transformations. It is much less fiddly and robust than a typical cgi
script, unless you want to put a lot of time and effort into testing it.
Cocoon requires NO programming language at all. You can get a very long
way using just xslt, with data-base access using ESQL which is also
xml-based. You get a complete Web-publishing framework, which sound like
what you want for a technical library. PDF, Postscript, and (X)HTML from
the one source, which might be DOCBOOK or TEI, among others.
Beyond the basics, in Cocoon, you may need to learn Java. That's the stage
I've got to, but I have yet to make the serious plunge.
On-line, the coml.lang.python newsgroup is very friendly to
beginners, by the way.
Unlike Cocoon, where your first steps are likely to be, shall we say,
'character building'.
