As part of the ongoing quest to create a more seamless integration between XML and Python, this article presents the xml_pickle module. The author discusses the design goals and decisions that went into xml_pickle and provides a list of likely uses.

In Python, modules and packages such as xmllib , xml.sax , pyxie , and xml.dom provide ways of handling XML documents that are common in the XML community. You may be familiar with similar modules and libraries available for other programming languages. In fact, many of these modules are based on language-neutral XML standards, and they commonly implement an XML-centric way of handling documents and objects

XML is a fairly simple format. It uses plain Unicode text rather than binary encoding, and all the structures are eclared with predictable-looking tags. Nonetheless, there are still enough rules in the XML grammar that a carefully debugged parser is needed to process XML documents -- and every parser imposes its own particular programming style. An alternative is to make XML even simpler. The open-source PYX format is a purely line-oriented format for representing XML documents that allows for much easier processing of XML document contents with common text tools like grep,sed, awk, wc, and the usual UNIX collection.

A century ago, when HTML and CGI ruled the waves, Perl dominated the Web programming scene. As the transition to XML on the Web gathers pace, competition for the hearts and minds of Web developers is heating up. One language attracting a lot of attention at the moment is Python.

This is the beginning of a short series on creating a software repository system built on Web services and developed in the Python programming language. Mike Olson shows you the details of using the 4Suite open-source XML server with Python to create Web service-based applications.In the first installment of the "Python Web services developer" column, we promised we'd show you lots of code. Unfortunately, when using Python out of the box, and many of the third party applications available in Python for Web services development, there is often little code to write. This is the case in this month's column as we put together an on-line information directory. The purpose of this directory is making software packages available for download. It supports real-time updating of the data and metadata about the software packages, searching the meta-data about the packages, and, of course, downloading the packages themselves