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At 2:48 PM -0700 4/13/04, Dennis Sosnoski wrote:
>Obviously I can't test every possible internal form that might be
>used by an application. However, the vast majority of XML document
>processing in Java is currently built on the event streams produced
>by SAX parsers. Any general XML format should be convertible to and
>from an event stream of this type, and in practice that's the way
>any alternative general formats are likely to be used (at least in
>the near term).
That doesn't sound at all plausible to me. If I have a specific
internal data structure that I wish to convert to XML, I would never
go through SAX. If I really didn't care about performance I might go
through XOM or JDOM, but if I cared about performance I'd just dump
out the strings or bytes as seemed appropriate. While certainly a few
people are using the SAX API to drive output, it's hardly a common
thing to do, nor is it at all necessary. I just can't see how the
task you want to benchmark corresponds to how XML is used.
The fact is XML is deliberately simple enough to be output
straight-forwardly without any fancy libraries. I can believe a
format like XBIS might be so complex that it really requires the
overhead of a special library just for output. But XML just isn't
that complicated. Unfortunately the massive gains in programmer
productivity from using a straight-forward, text format that can be
inspected and debugged in any text editor are rarely measured by
benchmarks. :-(
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
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