RoboGeek

The value of having XML built into the language A few days ago a javalobby thread asked if Java should go on a diet.  One of the culprits for their perceived bloat was the inclusion of XML libraries in the Java platform.

I'm not going to try and defend the inclusion of every one of the features in Java.

But let me share something .... I'm in the middle of writing a perl script to scan a directory structure and print out some data.  I want to format the data in XML because it's so easy to manipulate XML later.  I want to do it properly ... build a DOM tree, then serialize it, so that I don't have to worry about encoding issues if I were to hand-build the XML.

But, the perl installation available to me doesn't have XML built in.  To get XML::DOM to work I need to install several other packages.  Since I don't have write access to the perl installation (I'm not the super user in this case) I have to install outside the normal CPAN ritual, which meant stumbling through the perldocs to find the one paragraph that described how to install a perl module in the nondefault location.

You know what?  This rigamarole is ridiculous!!!  XML is such a core part of the modern computing environment.  For XML to be excluded from the core of any language today is ridiculous!!!

Why a perl script?  Java could do the whole thing right off the bat ... you set up the BuilderFactory etc, make a Document object, start filling it in, etc, it's all trivial and you don't have to worry about any encoding issues.  Unfortunately I want to record the file ownership and Java doesn't currently give you access to the file ownership, whereas perl does.
(2005-08-25 14:58:56.0) Permalink Comments [3]