As lARRYWALL, creator ofPerl, puts it, "Perl makes easyjobseasy and hard jobs possible." This is a large part of what makes Perl such a great language-most jobs really are easy in Perl. Butthat stillleaves the hard ones--database access, GUI development, Web clients, and so on. While they are undeniably possible in pure Perl, they arealso certainly not easy. Until you discover CPAN, that is. After that, all these jobs and more become a simple matter of choosing the right module. CPAN makes hard jobs easy. The first chapter of this book will show you how to get the mostout of CPAN. Although...

What Is This Book About? This is a book about Web Services. Web Services are still more like a movement than a mature technology. The movement is motivated by a vision of a semi-auto- mated Web that can support long chains of interactions between autonomous agents. There are three important components to that vision. One is interoperabil- ity: a service can have clients (agents) from any platform, in any language. Another is autonomy: an agent can discover the services it needs from their published descriptions that include both what the service can do and how it does it (the interfaces of...

XML Programming: Web Applications and Web Services with JSP and ASP provides a fast-moving introduction to the XML family of technologies for programmers. Although written with a focus upon JSP- and ASP-based XML solutions, the book presents the material from a language-independent point of view that benefits all developers, whatever their language. The code is written to be readable by all. Chapter 1 through 3 cover the foundations of XML well-formed and valid documents, DTDs and namespaces but XLink, XPointer, and elements of XSLT are introduced early so the examples can be interesting and...