Tool development: by Perl-wrapped XQuery

[Jakob Fix]

Talking of tools, what is the experience of people on this list with
xmlstarlet (http://xmlstar.sourceforge.net/) which seems to me like a
close contender to xmlsh (but haven't looked closely)?

cheers,
Jakob.



On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 13:09, David A. Lee<http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk> wrote:
>
>
>
>>
>> Now my questions: - would you recommend alternatives for rapid tool
>> development? - if taking a similar approach - would you like to recommend
>> special details, perhaps the script language actually used, or other aspect?
>>
>
> In my opinion the problem with doing this in perl is that unless the xquery
> implementation itself is in perl or atleast runs within the same process you
> will run into horrible performance problems.   See my (with Norm Walsh's)
> paper :
>
> http://www.balisage.net/Proceedings/vol4/author-pkg/Lee01/BalisageVol4-Lee01.html
>
> What we found is that for our test cases there is a 100-200x (yes 10000 % -
> 20000 % ) performance penalty of using a scripting language to call xml
> processing programs.   This *can* be optimized but the exact use cases of
> using a off-the-shelf scripting language to do this kind of thing is
> typically by the audience of people who do not want to spend the extra
> effort to optimize it, or who are not experts in the type of software
> development/languages required to  do it, or both. i.e its exactly why they
> are using scripting - so they don't have to do all that extra work.
>
> This is the primary reason xmlsh was invented instead of re-using an
> existing scripting language.   I took a "toy" program in a scripting
> language it worked great.
> But when I loaded up all the files I needed it to run it died a horrible
> death.   This is what I call "The Brick Wall" and why scripting XML
> processes fail so many of us.   The presentation cited above has some good
> charts and figures as well as the full test case code.
>
> This is why I suggest either (both)
>
> * Use a scripting language that already is 'in process' with all the XML
> core languages you want to use (xquery, xslt etc)
> -> examples XProc, xmlsh
>
> * Encourage scripting languages developers to embed these XML languages
> directly into the scripting languages (say perl).
> -> This is hard work and may in fact involve re-implementing many of the
> core tools from scratch.
> -> Some of the work is done but is incomplete ... I've seen references to
> XSLT implementions native in perl where the author quoted  something like
>  "This isnt a complete implementation of XSLT 1.0 but it works pretty good
> for me".
>
>
> --
> David A. Lee
> http://x-query.com/mailman/listinfo/talk  http://www.calldei.com
> http://www.xmlsh.org
> 812-482-5224
>
>
>
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