I wrote the first two chapters of an XML tutorial while my son slept in the back seat of the car. It was a surprisingly productive morning. I learned and wrote all about XML::Simple, which is very cool.
I have almost completely reversed my opinion on Perl and XML in the last year. I used to think that Perl was crap at processing XML. I'd been told it. It seemed to be the popular opinion.
Popular opinion perhaps, but it's bullshit. Perl kicks major XML processing ass. We have some brilliant people making Perl work as well on XML as it does on regular data--making easy things easy and hard things possible. And more and more things are becoming easy, rather than just possible.
Matt Sergeant, in particular, is a hard-working madman genius. Have you hugged your Matt today?
I saw an announcement for dbXML, an XML database in Java, released under an Apache-style license. I've been looking for something similar that Perl can talk to, but haven't found one. If anyone knows of such a beast, please let me know.
--Nat
