ANN: XBIS 0.9.5 and articles (binary XML permathread)

[Dennis Sosnoski <dms@sosnoski.com>]

I've got a new version of my XBIS (XML Binary Information Set) software 
out at http://www.xbis.org. This has gone through some major internal 
changes to clean up the architecture and to properly handle some of the 
messier issues with namespaces. It's intended that this should be able 
to maintain the canonical form of any XML documents roundtripped through 
XBIS. I haven't tested it with a canonicalization test suite yet, but I 
*do* include a program that does a simple roundtripping and comparison 
that works well for documents without namespaces (the namespace 
"attributes" get reordered in going through XBIS, so a simple 
byte-by-byte comparison fails).

The test programs now include a document size and performance comparison 
with zip/gzip formats. They also use a null XSLT transform for 
generating text output, which has greatly reduced the advantage shown on 
the output side for previous XBIS tests. I'm not sure this is entirely 
fair to XBIS, BTW - the XSLT transform requires that a SAX input stream 
support the optional namespace-prefixes feature (if the parser doesn't 
support this feature, the XSLT implementation just silently ignores the 
exception and generates crap output). This gives the XSLT code the names 
in qualified form, so it doesn't actually have to do any processing - it 
just dumps them directly to the output. The XBIS implementation, in 
contrast, only uses required features of the SAX2 API.

I've also got a pair of articles out on IBM developerWorks XML zone 
discussing the issues and these test results:

http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-trans1.html
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-trans2/

  - Dennis

-- 
Dennis M. Sosnoski
Enterprise Java, XML, and Web Services
Training and Consulting
http://www.sosnoski.com
Redmond, WA  425.885.7197