RE: XSLT

I know that AxKit (http://www.axkit.org) seems to be an up and coming
technology, with a brand new O'Reilly book.  It's pretty fun to use and
allows you to accomplish quite a bit with a minimum amount of coding...
However, knowing XSLT along with Perl is pretty much a prerequisite for most
AxKit use.

Also, I think a lot more information is being transmitted via XML these days
and how every nice Perl might be at dealing with XML, XSLT certainly has
advantages both in speed and simplicity in dealing with this information.

-- Jeff Horn

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Metro [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 8:21 PM
To: L-Perl-Jobs-Discuss
Subject: XSLT

A few weeks ago this job was posted:

> Online URL for this job: http://jobs.perl.org/job/2976
> Posted: August 18, 2005
> Company name: e/t/s didactic media
> [...]
> Required skills:
> [...]
> - XML, DOM, XSLT (using XML::LibXML and XML::LibXSLT) [...]
> 
> Desired skills:
> - enhanced mod_perl development
> - Apache::ASP
> - Template-Toolkit
> - SOAP::Lite
> - PHP (yes, you're reading correct)


And more recently:

> Online URL for this job: http://jobs.perl.org/job/2994
> Posted: August 24, 2005
> Company name: Night Kitchen Media
> [...]
> The candidate will work with our graphics and programming departments 
> to transition Dreamweaver HTML templates into a content management system.
> [...]
> Required skills:
> Perl 5 fluency
> HTML / CSS fluency
> XML / XSLT fluency
> Dreamweaver template proficiency.


And there were several jobs last month mentioning XSLT as a requirement.

I'm surprised to see so many Perl jobs mentioning XSLT these days. While you
can certainly use XSLT with Perl (and there are CPAN modules to help with
that), it seemed in the past that XSLT was more likely to be used by
non-Perl developers, and that Perl projects would be built around
HTML::Mason, Template-Toolkit, HTML::Template, or any of the dozens of other
templating tools. The two groups of technologies seemed to be in their own
worlds, and incompatible.

Anyone have theories as to why XSLT is rising in popularity on Perl
projects?

Is XSLT being used to solve other problems, rather than as a replacement
technology for traditional Perl templating modules? (Perhaps on these
projects it isn't even being used directly with Perl, though the first job
above mentions XML::LibXSLT.)

Are developers finally realizing the limitations of "mini-language" 
templating systems and are transitioning to technologies like XSLT or XMLC?
(You can send flames off-list if you want to debate this assertion. :-)

  -Tom

--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/e/fps/3452158/