19 May 2003 wspace   » (Journeyer)

Programming these days

Currently I use Python for 3 projects at work, they are:

  1. A CGI program that functions as a user interface to an XSLT transformation. So users fill in HTML forms and then some XSLT transformation is called, and the result displayed in the users' browser again. Since there is no XSLT support yet in Python, a Java transformation engine from Apache is called.

  2. A CGI program that functions as user interface to a simulation of a telecom application. This will also have webservers written in Python later.

  3. Research into component based programming. I use components written in Python. These components are used in 2.

Note the big CGI part in this. I would love to use something easier to work with, viz. Twisted, but I have to restrict myself to stuff available in the standard Python distributions, and then only the truly portable stuff (meaning no curses and other *n?xonly modules). For the applications the kind of protocol or other technicalities are not important.

XSLT is new for me. I have some prior experience with declarative programming (is that a good name for it?), namely with Prolog, and I used to like Prolog a lot. But my XSLT experienced is getting really spoiled because of the application: it uses XMI, that horrible XML vocabulary from OMG. Right now I am trying to find out how the hell statemachines are supposed to be encoded in XMI. The documentation (their so-called "specification") is a mess and absolutely unreadable. I will be glad when this job is done. And then, when my peace of mind has returned with respect to XML, I want to think about a fun application with XSLT.

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