[ale] FOP, XML, XSLT, perl, HTML, apache, PS, PDF, oh my.

[Michael Solberg]

Hi!

So, I need to build what is surely a cliche these days and I'd like some
advice/opinions because my options are buzzword bingo and I'm getting more
resumes and job descriptions than info from my google searches.

The system needs to be a CGI interface to a database that allows people to
edit various official documents.  These documents then need to be
instantly available to the users in HTML and PDF formats.

I'm definitely going to use an Apache webserver with a perl CGI interface
to a MySQL database. (I've already got all of those for other projects.)
But I'm a bit confused as to how to get the stuff back out of the DB into
a human readible format.  My first thought was to take the text from the
DB, parse that into postscript using perl, and then feed that to
ghostscript to create the PDFs.  Postscript seems like a pretty simple
language, and it seems like I could knock that out pretty fast.

But then I thought, "Hey!  Isn't this what that XML stuff is all about?"
My current knowledge of XML is pretty limited, but it seems like I could
either ditch the MySQL database for just a bunch of XML files, or pull the
XML from the MySQL on demand, and then feed the XML to FOP and magically
get PDFs and HTML.  Wow!  That sounds pretty neat, but the fine print
contains words like Java, Sax, and Document Object Model.  I'm pretty much
just a shell, perl, and C kind of guy, and I'm a little scared of those
fancy new-fangled technologies.

Surely some of you guys are doing this already.  How would this work?
Would I have to write a cron job that ran FOP or Xalan every five minutes
to create fresh PDF's?  Is there some magical apache module that would
create the PDF's on demand?  Should I just use perl and ghostscript?  Is
this XML stuff processor intensive?  Do I need a chunk of hardware for it?
Is this stuff all it's cracked up to be or does it just help pad resumes
and increase IPO's?

misha

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Michael Solberg                                   2.2850
System Admin|Tech Support                       Room 263
The University of Georgia                School of Music
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