Why is XML better than custom internal formats? Isn’t a non-standard set of XML tags basically equivalent to a custom format when using data internally to an application? Absolutely not, and here is why.
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DVSL is a fairly small, little known, product associated with the Velocity project over at Apache which takes the best part of XSLT: XPATH, and replaces the verbose and frustrating scripting of XSLT with a java-based template language instead.
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There are other ways of doing this, but I thought it would be fun to write a command-line xpath script in ruby using rexml. (full working example here)
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One of the more annoying aspects of writing developer documentation is that it is very easy for your code examples to get out of date, develop typos, etc(As those reading previous articles may have noticed). In this article I use docbook, xslt, and automake to generate code examples that are guaranteed to compile.
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So I used ruby to convert a simple hex string into a binary file in Converting hex to Binary in 4 Languages. Today I was trying to create a mixed ascii/binary file at work and created a little Domain Specific Language that has good possibilities.

NOTE: There is an expanded version of this script here: A Better Binary File Generator DSL in Ruby
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I thought I’d continue my series of writing the same application in multiple languages by trying to clone the wonderful network tool: netcat. For the first installation I’m going to try it in Ruby.

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