Wednesday, December 12, 2007

"XML" is a First Class DataType in PHP Too

Looks like Java is the odd man out, after all. It's not just JavaScript that has a simple and powerful way to manipulate XML (E4X). I just realised that PHP has such an extension too. It's called SimpleXML. Granted, it's not as powerful as E4X (no arbitrary depth double-dot operator, no attribute filtering, no wildcard asterisk operator), but it still provides enough simplicity and power to make XML processing seem not to be a pain.

Rajat is right. Java needs a datatype called "java.lang.XML" very soon, otherwise it may soon be abandoned by SOA practitioners in favour of PHP (or even server-side JavaScript, which the WSO2 Mashup Server folks are using with no apparent ill-effects).

Speaking of the WSO2 Mashup Server, those folk over at the community site virtually fall over each other to help newbies. I knew that Open Source communities were friendly, but these guys are something else. Thanks for all your help, Keith and Jonathan. I'm in shock and awe both at your enthusiastic support and the blistering pace of WSO2 development in general.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Ganesh

Firstly thanks for the support of our OSS projects. Secondly, its not just JS and PHP. Ruby has REXML. There's also some pretty good stuff (StreamingMarkupBuilder and the XMLSlurper) in Groovy.

prasadgc said...

Hmm, so what ails all the compiled languages?