Anyone on this list use AxKit? I'm curious how it pans out.
I used it for http://www.nikki-site.com (sorry, Japanese-only site). This site uses exactly 4 pure-mod_perl handlers, and everything else eventually goes through AxKit (excuse the site design, as far as development goes that is a one-man show, and I'm a programmer, not a designer ;)
I was keen on leveraging XSLT precisely because I knew that I'd be transforming a data source through mod_perl + in a cron job, AND I wanted to avoid using Perl on the cronjobs because of the resource constraints (puny server).
When a user requests data, AxKit uses a stylesheet to transform it to HTML. Meanwhile the same data source is preprocessed a couple of times behind the scenes to create derivative data, which is later available for users to fetch from Apache. The "preprocessing" is done using the same stylesheet as the one that AxKit, but it is run via multiple calls to xsltproc instead of going though Perl. So I get the speed of a C-based app using the same stylesheet as mod_perl. I like that ;)
(note for nit-pickers: I admit I didn't do an extensive comparison of how it would have faired to use optimized Perl, but the previous incarnation of www.nikki-site.com used to take about 3 minutes processing the same data -- xsltproc does it in about 13 seconds)
I also like the way AxKit applies transformation. I conceptually think of it as a set of filters, and that just fits my mental model. YMMV.
XSP is also very convenient, but I must admit I haven't harnessed its entire functionality.
On the other hand I must say that debugging problems on AxKit is pretty harsh on beginners. I went in with the mindset that if it was broken I was going to make it work, so I didn't have much problem, but that may or may not work for you.
Overall I find AxKit to be god-sent for my particular application. Things became much easier for me to add to the site, but if you're not already familiar with the workings of XML/XSLT, you may need a little patience.
--d
