Introduction
This site is not a consultancy or software vendor it is here to document my approach to software development using XML . It also has some ideas about how I propose deploying applications written using the tool and case studies. Hopefully this site will show that software development using high level XML constructs is a practical approach to rapid development of complex applications and that new ideas on how we sell and develop applications in the age of Web 2.0 are necessary.
As a jack-of-all-trades IT employee in a medium sized company I have had to develop techniques to produce quality practical applications in the shortest possible time as I have to split my time between user support, network management, application development, data and network security and general IT management.
I selected Perl as my primary tool for application creation because of it's flexibility but soon realised that there were segments of Perl code I always seemed to reuse. For example setting up a CGI script, parameter passing and database access. I thought to myself that it would be very useful to save all these code segments in a library so that I can just call up the relevant code segment when needed. I started considering how I would actually access and index such a library of code segments.
At about this time I started learning about XML and its structured approach to information storage seemed to suggest it was a natural for storing my code segment libraries. I looked for an application to do this with no luck so the only alternative was to do it myself.
Over a successions of weekends I finally had a rudimentary XML parser (which I called do.pl) and a folder (which I called soup) where all my code segments resided. Running the XML parser on a project XML file assembled all the code segments into a working Perl script, it worked! And continues to work to this day.
I then realised that this approach can be used for other things like assembling a web site, including all pages and links from a single xml site file! I also investigated using the system to generate HP printer escape codes, web forms and even producing assembler code for PIC processors. In all these cases I managed to represent the application as high level XML and once I had built up a library of code segments creating new variations of a project was like playing with lego.
So to this day I have heen creating almost all my new projects using Webepigenetics and the more code I have in the DNA the easier it is to create the next one. The code builds upon itself, you don't have to rewrite the same thing over and over again. Applications are created as an assembly of genes!
On this site I will put example projects and some demos of the technique in the hope that it inspires you to explore this approach.
This site is not a consultancy or software vendor it is here to document my approach to software development using XML . It also has some ideas about how I propose deploying applications written using the tool and case studies. Hopefully this site will show that software development using high level XML constructs is a practical approach to rapid development of complex applications and that new ideas on how we sell and develop applications in the age of Web 2.0 are necessary.
As a jack-of-all-trades IT employee in a medium sized company I have had to develop techniques to produce quality practical applications in the shortest possible time as I have to split my time between user support, network management, application development, data and network security and general IT management.
I selected Perl as my primary tool for application creation because of it's flexibility but soon realised that there were segments of Perl code I always seemed to reuse. For example setting up a CGI script, parameter passing and database access. I thought to myself that it would be very useful to save all these code segments in a library so that I can just call up the relevant code segment when needed. I started considering how I would actually access and index such a library of code segments.
At about this time I started learning about XML and its structured approach to information storage seemed to suggest it was a natural for storing my code segment libraries. I looked for an application to do this with no luck so the only alternative was to do it myself.
Over a successions of weekends I finally had a rudimentary XML parser (which I called do.pl) and a folder (which I called soup) where all my code segments resided. Running the XML parser on a project XML file assembled all the code segments into a working Perl script, it worked! And continues to work to this day.
I then realised that this approach can be used for other things like assembling a web site, including all pages and links from a single xml site file! I also investigated using the system to generate HP printer escape codes, web forms and even producing assembler code for PIC processors. In all these cases I managed to represent the application as high level XML and once I had built up a library of code segments creating new variations of a project was like playing with lego.
So to this day I have heen creating almost all my new projects using Webepigenetics and the more code I have in the DNA the easier it is to create the next one. The code builds upon itself, you don't have to rewrite the same thing over and over again. Applications are created as an assembly of genes!
On this site I will put example projects and some demos of the technique in the hope that it inspires you to explore this approach.