PCML in general (was: Why use PHP? What are the disadvantages?)

[David Gibbs <david@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Scott Klement wrote:
> PCML doesn't even need to exist, IMHO.  It's an overblown, 
> overengineered, overcomplicated way to do things.  Simple embedded 
> signatures would be much more efficient than kludgy, limited, XML
> documents.

But the caller has to know how the information should needs to be formatted for the called program.

Over engineered?  Over complicated?  Not from my perspective.  It's a pretty straight forward mechanism for calling host programs using structured parameters.

Yeah, it's got some limitations, but does a fine job in general.  I use it extensively.

> If you need PCML for slow, cumbersome languages like Java, then have
> it convert the binary object to PCML on-the-fly... it shouldn't be
> that hard.

How does this make things faster?  You'll have to connect to the system with the program information first to determine the parameter structure which is probably a lot slower than parsing XML once ... and ...

> But having the compiler parse XML for every thing I call would really
>  slow things down, and what advantage would it offer?

You can serialize the XML to a file so the it doesn't have to be re-parsed every time.

david