What is the best suited language to process XML in a web application?

Question

I'm planning a web application that requires a lot of XML processing: generate XML documents, validate against schemas, generate views from XSLT...
For diferent reasons I've ruled out .NET and J2EE. Also, when I say 'best suited' I'm thinking of syntactic simplicity rather than performance.
Any advantages in using PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails...?

Answer 1

Most languages should use some DOM API -- and/or even if they offer some other choice, using DOM might still be a good solution, as it'll make your code easier to understand by other developpers, as it's a standardized API.

PHP provides XML-manipulation classes based on DOM, that allow to create/read/update XML documents, use XPath and XSLT (no XSLT 2.0, though), validate against Schema, ...

For more informations about XML manipulation in PHP :

• Document Object Model
• And, when you just want to quickly read an XML Document, you might also be interested by SimpleXML