Cellular Phone product catalog

XML Admin

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A Perl based application to manage data through XML

XML Admin is a demo Perl application that provides an alternative way to build dynamic web sites: instead of using a conventional database, it uses a source XML document to store and retrieve the data. The main advantage of using XML as a data source is portability: since XML is a platform independent language, the XML document can be shared with other applications and servers, transmitted simply as a regular text file.

The XML Admin app flow

The demo uses two Perl modules that provide handling of XML documents:

• The XML::Parse module is used to read and parse the original XML document in order to extract specific data from it, the results are formatted as regular HTML in either the catalog summary view (which displays a few relevant fields from each product) or the product detail view (which displays all data for a specific record).


• The XML::Twig module is then used to modify the XML document whenever product data is updated or deleted by the user. This module uses XPath pattern matching in order to identify the records that need to be modified or deleted, and then it rewrites the XML document with the updated information.

Thanks to the flexibility of XML, the application can be easily modified to provide different views of the same XML document, displaying as much or as little data as required. Since XML data is self-describing, this application can be made to accept any XML document with minor modifications - it can easily be turned from a cell phone catalog into a store directory, a book repository, a phone list or any other data driven resource.