Python has a very good lxml module for advanced XML processing. You can define your own classes for XML elements, so you can read an XML file and get your own c

Python has a very good lxml module for advanced XML processing. You can define your own classes for XML elements, so you can read an XML file and get your own classes for the underlying elements. They're somewhat limited, you can easily define methods, but the data is locked to what's in XML. You can also define your own XPath functions and XSLT extensions. Comes very handy sometimes. The API is still rather awkward though.