PHP and XML

I’m still coding away on the ExB project. I’ve re-done the site so that it is now powered by PHP and XML. It was a nice learning experience teaching myself PHP, although it seems something of an odd mix (eg. the function names are somewhat inconsistant strlen and str_replace, why isnt it str_len or strreplace?). So Perl still remains my prefered web server side language.

XML is just blooming marvelous. I’m finding lots of uses for that, Java and PHP have built in support, Perl has some great extensions (which I havnt tried). XML is quite simply a file format, just like comma seperated or databases. Its power lies in the fact its highly portable (it can be used on mulitple operating systems), is easy to debug (its in plain text, so you can open up a text editor to find any problems), lots of languages are moving to have built in support.