Python & XML

Subject: Python & XML
From: Lars Marius Garshol <larsga@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 15 Apr 1999 10:06:13 +0200
* John E. Simpson
| 
| I for one would love to hear about your (or anyone else's)
| experiences with Perl/Python X*L-processing tools. Thanks for
| bringing it up.

I've been using (and writing :) Python XML processing tools for about
a year now and am very pleased with the combination of Python and XML.
I don't do XML stuff in Java (or Perl for that matter) any more unless
I absolutely have to.

Since Python is so simple, using the tools is simple as well and when
something is wrong you can usually read the source and sometimes even
fix it.

If you're at all serious about doing XML programming I would
definitely recommend taking a look at Python. Chances are you'll find
yourself using it for all sorts of other stuff as well. The only real
weaknesses for XML work are a lack of true garbage collection and
Unicode support. The latter is being fixed, though. Speed may also be
an issue, but you can almost always fix that by redoing the critical
parts in C.

It's become a Swiss army knife with serious extensions for me. I've
written POP clients and servers for various specialized uses, CGI
scripts, web publishing scripts, link checkers, DBF file readers and
much much more in it. In fact, almost all the parts of my personal
infrastructure that I've built myself are built with Python.

Having used it for a year and a half now I'm very satisfied with it,
and although it's far from perfect there aren't many languages that I
feel can compete when it comes to ease of programming. Optional type
checking would be nice, as would a lot of the stuff that Common Lisp
has.

*cough*

Anyway, I'll stop ranting now.

--Lars M.


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