Conclusions

AxKit provides web developers with the tools they need to deliver complex systems quickly, and eases them into the development process. It gives them the power to develop their own system for stylesheet decision making and also the flexibility to design completely new stylesheet languages. All of this while integrating tightly with Apache, providing a fast, scalable and well architectured system. But then, I'm biased.

AxKit is not finished yet, however the majority of the features described above are built and working very reliably. The most significant things missing from AxKit are SAX based stylesheet languages (which just need to be designed and built - which I have a number of ideas for), and alternate ways to generate the initial XML file (which cocoon calls "Producers"). These will be coming in a future release. Being free software I hope people will jump in and help. We have the beginnings of an active mailing list, where you can vote on features, or help develop them, or simply lurk. We're moving extremely quickly with the features. Developing in Perl allows us to do this, while still maintaining readable code (something I deem very important - so don't assume because it's written in Perl that it's going to be a ball of spaghetti!). If there's something you'd like to see in AxKit, please join the mailing list and participate with us.