generate XML command front to package

[jorg]

Hi, Are there any packages available that will translate

<myobject>
 <function name="init">
  <parameter name="arg1">value1</parameter>
  <parameter name="arg2">value2</parameter>
 </function>
</myobject>

to

my $object = new MyObject();
$object->init(value1, value2);

*automatically* ? I don't want to write the parsing code for all the packages i want to access this way. I remember a long time ago seeing something vaguely similar here on perlmonks. Any thoughts?

Jorg

"Do or do not, there is no try" -- Yoda

[edan]

Sounds like a dirty job! You might want look into SOAP.

HTH

--
3dan

[jorg]

well soap is one way of doing this ofcourse but consider the following

->java XML frontend accessing perl backend (high load).

Soap wouldn't give me the scalability i need, by using perl in a cgi environment i can piggyback on top of apache for performance.

Jorg

"Do or do not, there is no try" -- Yoda

[Anonymous Monk]

Soap wouldn't give me the scalability i need, by using perl in a cgi environment i can piggyback on top of apache for performance

That is wrong. The only way apache/perl can give your high performance is through mod_perl, especially when using XML:: modules to parse xml properly. You're needlessly reinventing a wheel called SOAP.

[gjb]

You could also have a look at XML-RPC, it's more lightweight than SOAP, but of course a bit less versatile.

Hope this helps, -gjb-

[derby]

I don't know any off the top of my head but how about writing a stylesheet and then using XSLT?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" 
   version="1.0">
<xsl:output method="text" indent="yes" encoding="ISO-8859-1"/>

<xsl:template match="myobject">
eval {
  my $object = new MyObject();<xsl:apply-templates select="function" /
+>
};
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="function">
  $object-><xsl:value-of select="@name" />(<xsl:apply-templates select
+="parameter"/>);
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="parameter">
    <xsl:value-of select="." />
    <xsl:if test="not(position()=last())">, </xsl:if>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

-derby

[jeffa]

You could use the technique i presented at XML::Simple + Class::MethodMaker. With your XML it would be something like:

package MyObject;
use Class::MethodMaker
   new_hash_init => 'new',
   get_set       => [qw(arg1 arg2)],
;

package main;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use XML::Simple qw(2.08);

my $xml = XMLin(\*DATA);
my %arg = map {
   $_ => $xml->{function}{parameter}{$_}{content}
} keys %{$xml->{function}{parameter}};

my $object = MyObject->new(%arg);
print $object->arg1(), "\n";
print $object->arg2(), "\n";

__DATA__
<myobject>
 <function name="init">
  <parameter name="arg1">value1</parameter>
  <parameter name="arg2">value2</parameter>
 </function>
</myobject>

If you control the XML, you might want to consider using a simpler approach, one that doesn't require addition munging like i had to do with map.

Additionally, this is Perl. I am sure there is some way to dynamically create these classes. You could read the XML first, determine what class to create and what parameters to pass along, and then instantiate the object with the desired argument values.

Then again, maybe SOAP or XML-RPC would serve you better.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

[cheshirecat]

You could look at XML::Config as the basis for your code

Given a well formed configuration file like this:

<Root>
 <A_variable>A Key</A_variable>
</Root>

it returns:

{A_variable => 'A Key'}

'Cat