Serving XML with Active Server Pages
By Michael Floyd
As it turns out, there are a lot of ways to serve XML. If you're a Perl programmer, you can use the XML::Parser module in Perl to load XML documents into the DOM. The XML::Parser module is definitively top-shelf software. The module was developed by Larry Wall, Perl's inventor, and later modified by Clark Cooper. The module provides an interface to James Clark's Expat parser, which coincidentally will be the parser of choice in the long-awaited Navigator 5. (I also have it on good authority that Infoseek uses the Expat parser in its add-on to Ultraseek Server.)
As I've previously described, you can also serve up XML using Java servlets. One thing I haven't mentioned is the Cocoon project, which is an effort by developers from the Apache Group to add XML capability to the Apache Web server. Cocoon itself is a Java servlet that specifically supports XML and XSL. Cocoon by default uses the OpenXML parser and XSL:P to process style sheets. However, Cocoon is also designed to work with IBM's XML for Java (XML4J) and LotusXSL processors, and the processors that are included with Sun's ProjectX.
Did I say ProjectX? Right, that's Sun's effort to enable Java applications with the power of XML.
Java ProjectX includes both validating and nonvalidating parsers that conform to the XML 1.0 Recommendation. The distribution also supports the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 1 specification, and Simple API for XML (SAX) 1.0
