XML Publishing with AxKit

Chapter 9. Integrating AxKit with Other Tools

Perl excels at munging textual data. It was specifically designed to simplify the task of extracting and reporting data from text-based formats. As a result, it offers many built-in high-level text-processing facilities. Perl’s nature is quite liberal. It presumes (rightly, I believe) that most people who write programs on a daily basis are not classically trained computer scientists. Therefore, it strives to be useful at every level of expertise. Given these features and the reality that the vast majority of web-programming tasks involve extracting data and presenting it in a textual format (often HTML markup) under tight deadlines, it’s no wonder that Perl enjoys wide success as a web-development technology. And, by extension, you should not be surprised to find CPAN (the Perl community’s extension repository) bursting with modules and packages that attempt to streamline the mundane details of web publishing.

Among the most popular types of Perl web modules are templating systems and web-application frameworks. Though the two often overlap in practice, you can distinguish between them. Templating systems are concerned solely with generating consistent document content. Web-application frameworks typically do the same but also provide a development environment that simplifies common back-end programming tasks (database access, etc.), reduces redundancy, and fosters good coding practices. From this perspective, AxKit itself is perhaps ...