Re: [xml-dev] 3 Sins of XML Usage

[Norman Gray <norman@astro.gla.ac.uk>]

Roger, hello.

On 25 Oct 2012, at 17:46, "Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org> wrote:

> Sin #1: Using Java to Process XML 

This seems such an eccentric proposition that I think I must be misunderstanding you.

If by 'process XML' you mean 'turning XML into other XML in what is basically a reformatting job' then yes, XSLT would obviously be top of the list of candidate technologies.  But it depends what has to happen to the information during its processing.

It's not as if processing XML with Java (to pick your example application language, which is far from being my favourite) is particularly nasty.  You suck the XML in with SAX (implementing a ~10-function interface to do so), do your magic, and serialise the result.  If the serialisation target is XML, that ends up being the most annoying part of the process in my experience.

XSLT is an attractive language in many ways, but it's sufficiently syntactically nasty that I always end up grinding my teeth if I write more than a relatively small amount of it.  One can over-sell the case for XSLT.

And I know that XPath is a distinct language, but (possibly my ignorance) I'm not aware of many opportunities to use that outside the context of XSLT.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  http://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK