Perl/XML/XSL Server-Side Programming

So far we have used perl and PHP to generate dynamic web pages from an sql database.

Lets examine a new approach to accessing a different type of web database.

There is a revolution taking place on the web. That revolution is XML, eXtensible Markup Language.

It is a simple concept with profound implications that has spawned a dictionary full of new terms and acronyms.

In essence though,

• XML represents a new way to store and transmit data via the web.
• XML allows us to store a database in a plain text form using custom designed markup tags that describe that data.
• XML looks similiar to html but it is not html and that comparision can be misleading

The XML file itself contains no information relating to how that data should be presented.

Instead the actual presentation of the data is left to a suitably designed
Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) file which is actually also an xml file.

The benefit of this approach is that changing the style sheet changes what and how data is displayed.

In practical terms we will,

 Use a programming language such as perl to dynamically generate an XSL file  
which will control what and how the XML data is displayed.

XSL is significantly more powerful than traditional stylesheets as it can incorporate programming structures such as if/then, sorts and loops.

Blottos XML Select-A-Wine

We will use the xml/xsl/perl approach to allow a user to query an XML database for a particular year and display the wines in a web page.

If you are online, try this url Blottos XML Select-A-Wine

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