2 Qs XML(loosly) and reinventing the wheel

E J moiraine at qwest.net
Thu Feb 14 12:20:42 CST 2002


First question:
I'm slowly getting the whole XML thing.  I was poking around trying to 
find some stuff on Perl and XML.  There's a lot, but I feel a little 
overwhelmed.  I read the O'Reilly XML book, so I understand the 
basics...I guess, I'm just looking for a good resource of info on how to 
play around with xml...er...using Perl :-).  I have a whole bunch of the 
libXML modules (libXML-libXMl...anyone?anyone? I guess it's a debian 
dpkg thing...<shrug>), so I have *some* of the documentation.  I have a 
Perl cgi script that displays/searches my /usr/share/doc dir for doc 
dirs. Anyway, I understand the basics, but does anyone know of examples 
of playing with XML?

Hm.....lets rephrase the question.

Does anyone know the location of a variety of examples from simple to 
complex of Perl parsing XML?

That was better...hehe.

Second Question:
Reinventing the wheel is one of those concepts that is rough to define 
isn't it?  That's not the question, but you can answer if you want...of 
course, I can't stop you because if you're reading this you have a copy 
on your computer and you can do anything you want on your 
comptuer...where was I?  That's not the question either.
When is it reinventing the wheel?
Ok...I downloaded a few Perl apps (message boards) to compare.  Some I 
like better than others, but none of them *did* it for me.  (btw, a lot 
of them look almost exactly alike)  So, there's this one that *looks* 
good, but under that hood it's practically disgusting.  Well, it's more 
than just content.  On the outside it has a logical structure and it 
works.  Except for the code looking like a monkey got into the computer 
and messed around with it, it's practically perfect.  Now, I've taken it 
upon myself to clean up the code.  At first it was simple, but I've gone 
a lot deeper.  It's taken me a long time to find one I'm remotely 
comfortable with (requirments: configurablity, simplicity, threads 
(important), and Perl (very very important:-).  Oh yes...I'm also 
cleaning it up for mod_perl.  The first step type, use strict, save, 
run, clean up all errors...hehe.  Another thing I've noticed is that 
delving into someone else's code has helped me learn a fair amount.  Get 
an alternative perspective.  I guess the code isn't all that ugly 
realy...I'm just used to use strict.

Ok...back to the question.
Delving has taken a little while already.  Should I wade through more 
forum apps trying to find another one I like, or should I continue to 
play with the code?

btw.  The licence is Free, but I do want to notify the author before 
putting it up anywhere "public".

Thanks for reading this hideously long thing, and thanks for advance for 
your answers.

Elizabeth

remind me not to post before 11am ever ever again, as there's a decided 
lack of coffee running through my system.  thnx again.

-----
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keep forgetting to mark the whole attached thing.  It has my Perl Geek 
Code :-)

TIMTOWTDI



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