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Thursday, July 11, 2002 |
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XSH: A Perl viewing/editing shell for XML
Kimbro Staken was intrigued by XSH, a Perl viewing/editing shell for XML:
In this month's Perl and XML column, Kip Hampton introduces XSH, an XML editing shell, which Kip suggests should become a part of your XML tool kit. [XML.com]
At first glance it seems like a pretty odd concept, but I think this should actually be really useful. As an interactive tool it's kind of interesting, but the very interesting thing is that you can use it to build executable scripts to manipulate XML in a pretty simple manner. Apparently it supports XUpdate too, which is a surprise. Not sure why it does given the much more compact language it provides to do the same things. [Kimbro Staken: XML Database JuJu]
I'm intrigued also. This looks like the iODBC of XML, an ancient tool that Brian Jepson and I found, when comparing notes recently, we still use.
9:26:31 AM 
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Monday, April 01, 2002 |
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XML::Simpler released to CPAN
Grant McClean has made the popular XML::Simple even simpler. From the XML::Simpler documentation:
The data structures returned by XMLin() have been vastly simplified. All hashrefs and arrayrefs have been eliminated, and instead the contents of the XML file are represented using a single scalar value which perfectly preserves the fidelity of the original document. In fact the format of this data structure is so intuitive that new users will be able to work with it immediately without reading the documentation.
Thanks, Grant!
11:05:19 AM
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Sunday, March 24, 2002 |
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Cross-platform coffee cups
Years ago I evangelized the notion of a local scripting engine, serving web apps up into the browser. I thought then, and still think now, this is the biggest untapped opportunity for Perl and Python and Ruby.
Perhaps now that Radio UserLand has broken the ice, the idea of a script-based local app server will gain more traction. DJ Adams, who uses Linux and so can't be an RU user, was intrigued by the channelroll idea. So he grabbed Rael Dornfest's Peerkat and whipped up, in Perl, an app that responds to clicks on a Radio-style coffe-cup icon by injecting the specified RSS feed into an instance of Peerkat.
Very cool. RU is a lively experiment, but the publish/subscribe technology that is part of what makes RU so compelling is not, and should not be, application-specific. DJ is somebody I'll want to subscribe to, and who I'll want to subscribe to me. How we accomplish that is really beside the point.
8:49:42 PM
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Friday, March 15, 2002 |
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JavaScript, Perl, Python, .NET
Peter Drayton on JS.NET:
> I believe there is a market for a language much simpler than VB.NET.
For this, I suggest JScript.NET, which is also included in the .NET Framework. The funny thing is, while JScript is a relatively simple language, the JScript.NET compiler is actually very sophisticated, since it has to support late binding, prototype classes, typed and typeless variables, dynamic evaluation and a slew of other 'scripting' features. Basically the compiler does all the requisite magic to present a very friendly, simple face to programmers, while doing all the underlying goo needed to make these semantics work in the CLR. [Peter Drayton]
I just tried Peter's example:
var query = new ActiveXObject("IXSSO.Query");
query.Columns = "directory,filename";
query.Query = "@filename=*.txt";
query.Catalog = "System";
var rs = query.CreateRecordSet("sequential");
while (!rs.EOF) {
print(rs(0)+ ""\\" + rs(1));
rs.MoveNext;
}
Interesting. Could the same principles bring this Perl/Python research to fruition?
1:08:32 PM
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Friday, March 08, 2002 |
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Wednesday, January 23, 2002 |
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Randal Schwartz's incremental file finder. A very nice tutorial on how (and why) to use Perl's tied hash feature.
4:06:27 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Jon Udell.
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