RSS, SOAP, and Other XML Applications (Perl and XML)

In the next couple of chapters, we'll cover, at long last, what happens when we pull together all the abstract tools and strategies we've discussed and start having XML dance for us. This is the land of the XML application, where parsers all have a bone to pick, picking up documents with a goal in mind. No longer satisfied with picking out the elements and attributes and calling it a day, these higher-level tools look for meaning in all that structure, according to directives that have been programmed into it.

When we say XML application, we are specifically referring to XML-based document formats, not the computer programs (applications of another sort) that do stuff with them. You may run across statements such as "GreenMonkeyML is an XML application that provides semantic markup for green monkeys." Visiting the project's home page at http://www.greenmonkey-markup.com, we might encounter documentation describing how this specific format works, example documents, suggested uses for it, a DTD or schema used to validate GreenMonkeyML documents, and maybe an online validation tool. This content would all fit into the definition of an XML application.

This chapter looks at XML applications that already have a strong presence in the Perl world, by way of publicly available Perl modules that know how to handle them.

9.1. XML Modules

The term XML modules narrows us down from the Perl modules on CPAN that send mail, process images, and play games, but it still leaves us with a very broad cross section. So far in this book, we have exhaustively covered Perl extensions that can perform general XML processing, but none that perform more targeted functions based on general processing. In the end, they hand you a plate of XML chunklets, free of any inherent meaning, and leave it to you to decide what happens next. In many of the examples we've provided so far in this book, we have written programs that do exactly this: invoke an XML parser to chew up a document and then cook up something interesting out of the elements and attributes we get back.

However, the modules we're thinking about here give you more than the generic parse-and-process module family by building on one of the parsers and abstracting the processing in a specific direction. They then provide an API that, while it might still contain hooks into the raw XML, concentrates on methods and routines particular to the XML application that they implement.

We can divide these XML application-mangling Perl modules into three types. We'll examine an example of each in this chapter, and in the next chapter, we'll try to make some for ourselves.

XML application helpers: Helper modules are the humblest of the lot. In practice, they are often little more than wrappers around raw XML processors, but sometimes that's all you need. If you find yourself writing several programs that need to read from and write to a specific XML-based document format, a helper module can provide common methods, freeing the programmer from worrying about the application's exact document format or its well-formedness in generated output. The module will take care of all that.
Programming helpers that use XML: This small but growing category describes Perl extensions that use XML to do cool stuff in your program, even if your program's input or output has little to do with XML. Currently, the most prominent examples involve the terrifying, DBI-like powers of XML::SAX, the whole PerlSAX2 family, and individual tools like the XML::Generator::DBI module, which crossbreeds existing Perl modules for database manipulation and SAX processing.
Full-on applications that use XML: Finally, we have software that uses XML, but has so many layers of abstraction between its intended purpose and the underlying XML that calling it an XML application is like calling Microsoft Word a C application. For example, working with SOAP::Lite involves documents that are barely human-readable and exist only in memory until they're shot over the Internet via HTTP; the role of XML in SOAP is completely transparent.

Chapter 9. RSS, SOAP, and Other XML Applications

Contents:

9.1. XML Modules