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

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