All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Simple Text Transformation Tool!?

jonasbn on 2008-06-26T11:33:34

I received an edition the alphaWorks newsletter some time ago an article and one of the products, sort of stood out when skimming the newsletter.

A simple, extensible tool that allows powerful transformations on text files

It sounded awfully familiar, not that Perl is the only text manipulating tool around, but still.



So I clicked the link and had a brief look.

In points this is what it can do:

  1. Translation of a file using Javaâ„¢ translation bundles
  2. Translation of a file using the Tivoli® Message Standard
  3. Analysis of a file using an HTML page
  4. Analysis using the Java highlighter
  5. Use of the analyzer for searching and replacing


Here is my subjective translation of what it can do (in same order as above):

  1. Localization translation
  2. This one is very specific I will get back to that one later
  3. HTML grabbing
  4. Class name locating in files
  5. Search and replace


So if you look at the second point, it is a collection of all of the above aimed at a specific product.

I am sort of amazed by what IBM can do in the year of 2008, I do not know about you, but things seem to have gone downhill or are they just re-releasing old stuff to the new generations of CTOs and CEOs?

If course it comes with buzzword compliance and all sorts of IBM dependencies and integration.

I think I will stick with Perl as my 'Simple Text Transformation Tool'