Flashes of Panic

I’m back to work. Not that I haven’t been working, but it’s getting absorbing again. Yesterday’s meeting bred another one later in the day; I’m learning CVS and facing JSP again. (Honestly, what is it about Java? Is it that people learned it sometime in the 90s because of the buzz, then felt like, well, now I know it, I need to use it?)

I spent today on very basic stages of taking apart Movable Type—looking closely at the templates and how they’re managed over the life of a multi-blog installation, for example, and then reading up on the Perl code and the API with an eye to short-circuiting parts of the administrative interface.

The part I find most amusing is that I appear to have become the XSLT person on the team, not because I profess to know XSLT particularly well, but because my exposure to it is more recent than anyone else’s. XSL, for those who are mystified by all these TLAs, is a way of “styling” raw XML, but it’s beyond CSS; it lets you select content based on its context within the XML document. This is where the “T” comes in; with an engine to apply XSL Transformations to an XML document, you can make any well-formed XML document into pretty nearly any other format of well-formed XML document. And since we’re going to be handing a lot of stuff around this application in XML—several flavors and channels of web feeds, for example—being able to XSLT them into whatever we need is helpful.

So all that XSLT stuff I downloaded last semester is going to come in handy for development work. But right now? Not really XSLT; rather, generating a servlet interface for Saxon and getting it running in Tomcat. Because what’s the use if we can’t talk to it from Java, right?

For those keeping track, I’ve added NetBeans (because I need another IDE, of course) and SmartCVS to the list of tools on my Powerbook.