XMLscript

[Bruno Vernier <vernier@vc.bc.ca>]

Good news for XML-ophiles:

Thanks to Doug Loss (who privately informed me about this new freshmeat link), 
I have started using XMLscript (really just a single executable called xtract) 
from www.xmlscript.org in order to do XML transformations with EDUML.

XMLscript is freeware but not (yet) open source.  The company who wrote it is 
now "evaluating" the reaction to XMLscript to see what type of free licence 
they will choose for XMLscript (xtract)

I have been in constant contact with them for a week (helped squash a minor 
bug, discussions about licencing). I find the tutorial that comes with it to 
be a good introduction to XML itself as well as a well done lesson in XML 
transformations and information extraction from XML files. I find xtract to 
be admiringly simple yet powerful to use. I rewrote several of my current 
projects with XMLscript and reduced my volume of code by about 50% .

XML transformations is about converting files of one (XML) format to files of 
another (XML) format. It is also about extracting (hence the name) 
information from an XML file (similar idea to using SQL to extract info from 
an SQL-compliant database) . So given any XML file, I can now easily extract 
just the right information from it, or convert it into EDUML (and vice 
versa)... with often only one line of code. (XMLscript claims to do non-XML 
to non-XML conversions as well but I (after trying it successfully) still 
think PERL is better for that sort of thing ; however XML to non-XML is 
easier in XMLscript).

I made a thorough search of the internet to see what others have said about 
XMLscript and found almost nothing. It is really new on the internet scene 
(but really about 6 month old). It has been about a week since it was 
announced on freshmeat.

Hope some of you find this news useful :-)

http://www.xmlscript.org

Bruno