Community controlled languages - Perl - PHP - Python
Although we spend most of our efforts working on a general purpose language like Perl, Python, Java, PHP... we often find the need to work on a specialist language. Sometimes we don't even consider these a language. SQL (Structured Query Language) is a perfect language for doing relational queries. Generally speaking if someone says they don't like doing SQL then it is either because they don't use it as a language or they don't need to use it as a language (another talk). Regular Expressions are yet another language we use regularly (pun intended). RE are perfect for finding and substituting text and you can write code that you would normally write with loops and substring matches in a fraction of the code, and they are often easier to read and write. This is an important point for a language it should be self descriptive where it can. General purpose languages can fall down here when doing specialist tasks.
Where is this all going? - XSLT. XML Stylesheet Language Tranlsator - technically the language is just XSL but the industry tends to incorrectly use them interchangably. What is XML useful for ? XML by itself is as useful as ASCII, and probably as usless. Generally speaking we want to do something with the data. This may be translating our ASCII Tab Separated file into a graph, or our XML news feed into some HTML. XSL is an easy and standard way for translating XML from one form into another but it also has some very interesting side effects.
This talk will be an introduction to XSL. It contains a simple set of examples that we will work through. Each example starts off with a simple bit of data in the form of XML and is translated into another form. I will also go through some of the command line tools and a very short example in Perl (the code will work anywhere XSL does, the perl part is only a short demonstration of how easy it is to integrate).
See you at the next OSDClub