Re: Novice. Pointers please!

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Rajesh Kommineni asks -

> I have little experience developing stand-alone XML
> applications. I want to develop web applications.
> Please advice me. I am using a Web Server that
> supports only CGI and I cant use Java. How can I
> develop web applications? I don’t want to limit my web
> client to IE 5.0 and cant use asp/jsp.  Can any one
> point me to tutorials on developing web applications
> with xml as a representation?
>
> I am thinking to use XSLT to convert xml to html and
> serve it to web client. How else can I do it?
> Is this the right way to design? If I want to keep the
> xml on the wire, do I definitely need to use asp or
> perl to parse the xml on the client side? or to
> rephrase, what are the requirements for the client?

You can do lots of things with cgi using scripts.  Python or perl stand out (I
prefer Python).  You can also use Cold Fusion via cgi if you have to (nothing
to do with xml, really, but its good for a lot of things).

You could consider changing to another server, too.  But you definitely aren't
limited to asp or perl.

If you can't control the client, then you have to create plain html on the
server side.  So here are basically no requirements on the client except for
being a browser. (of course, this conclusion does depend on what you intend to
do at the client!)

The main thing you need to do is to get familiar with html requests and how to
handle them.  Most of the useful languages have a library that handles the
requests.  Learn how to use it.  Usually, you create the output and write it
either to standard out or to a particular file.

Sorry, I don't have any tutorial references handy.  Someone else will post
them, though.

Cheers,

Tom P