chris writes: I am at the crossroads of balancing my use of Perl (hacking mostly) with my need to port a lot of our services to XML for DB-backed sites as well as for content and data control.
I hate to say it but M$ looks tight and so does Cacoon and its Java.
Aside from the obvious desire I have to "keep it Perl" -- if I am looking for the best tool for the job -- and the job is XML -- is Perl and Apache and Linux really the best solutions? Really?
Maybe this is the wrong place to ask for an objective opinion. But maybe it isn't.
If you need to increase the runtime performance, you could always install Apache with mod_perl.
Clark Cooper did a performance test of various XML parsers in C/C++, Perl, Java and Python a while back for XML.com, and his XML::Parser gave adequate performance for most purposes. Of course, "adequate performance" is highly subjective; I don't think I'd even to use Perl or Java if I were managing a few TB of XML data; C/C++ is the only practical option at that point.
I think you should stick to Perl until you have something that absolutely doesn't work with it. But maybe that's just me.
Yet you ask for an objective opinion. IMO, that's a very unrealistic wish.
-- Abigail
