XML Publishing with AxKit

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Summary: How to publish XML
Review: Suppose you have a bunch of XML data. You want to offer it up on the web and your web server happens to be the most common one, Apache. Perhaps, as Hampton points out, you want to make the data available in various transformed ways - HTML, PDF or RTF, say, as these are very common formats. Each format needs a different operator to generate its output from your XML. Well, you may be in luck. Hampton suggests adopted AxKit as a way to do all this, fully compatible with Apache.

Along the way, he offers concise ways to use XSLT, XSP, RSS and stylesheets. In other words, he gives a motivating context in which to quickly learn the rudiments of these packages. Certainly not comprehensive in each. But this can be a blessing in disguise. For example, the full expressive power of XSLT grammar can be rather daunting to master. So his book also practises an informal but useful subtheme. He gives you a pragmatic minimum acquaintance with various subsidiary packages that are not AxKit itself. A useful extra benefit of the book.

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Summary: XML Publishing for Apache and Perl programmers
Review: XML seems to be on the mind of just about everyone who publishes information to the Internet. The big advantage is the ability to take content and publish it in various formats from a single source. As a general rule when you are talking about XML you are talking about using Java to implement it. AxKit gives the user the ability to publish XML documents using Perl. That means that you will have to have Perl installed to use it. Basically the prerequisites are an Apache server, the mod_perl Apache extension module, an XML parser written in Perl or in C with a Perl interface module, and the AxKit distribution. One you have all that put together and functioning you can start using the book to learn how to publish XML documents with AxKit. The actual techniques in the book are straightforward and well explained. If you are familiar with Perl there is nothing complex here, just a few different things to learn but nothing bizarre. With plenty of sample scripts so you can follow along and write your own following the examples XML Publishing with AxKit is a recommended read for people who are very familiar with Perl and want to get up and running with XML publishing with the minimum of effort.