[MacPerl] AppleEvents from Perl vs. Perl from Frontier?

[Jonathan Bellack <jonathan@bellack.com>]

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Hi.  I'm working on a Quark->HTML document conversion project.  I'm being
given XpressTags documents that need to be batch-converted, and I need to
create a fairly elaborate end format.  To avoid writing an XpressTags->HTML
translator, I'm planning to use AppleScript to pull the XpressTags
documents into Quark and do the conversion using highly-scripted
BeyondPress (Quark Xtension for generating HTML, complex but very
scriptable).  To handle the elaborate end format, I need to do
text-processing that's more complicated than BeyondPress can handle (a lot
of nightmarish table-juggling).  I've got a fair amount of Perl experience,
so I want to use Perl to do the elaborate post-processing.  I'm considering
three options:

- Write the XpressTags->Quark->BeyondPress->HTML piece in AppleScript or
Frontier, and then call a MacPerl script for post-processing

- Write a MacPerl script which either executes an embedded AppleScript or
calls AppleEvents to do the whole thing.

- Learn Frontier and use it to do the whole thing.

Any opinions?  I've got the examples from the Perl Anarchists Cookbook, and
am starting to look at the AEGizmos documentation, but I wanted to see if
anyone has had a similar experience building an AppleScript/Perl hybrid app.

Thanks in advance.


     -- Jonathan Bellack
        Bellack Web Consulting
        jonathan@bellack.com
        http://www.bellack.com