RE: [xml-dev] No XML Binaries? Buy Hardware

["Michael Champion" <mc@xegesis.org>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Len Bullard [mailto:cbullard@hiwaay.net]
> Sent: Thursday, February 22, 2007 4:46 AM
> To: 'Nathan Young -X (natyoung - Artizen at Cisco)'; 'XML Developers List'
> Subject: [xml-dev] No XML Binaries? Buy Hardware
 
> If XML has such a negligible impact on performance, why do companies like
> Cisco and IBM buy small companies that build XML hardware accelerators?

Who says that XML has a negligible effect on performance anymore?  It's
probably true that in traditional document processing scenarios the
percentage of overall app time spent actually parsing and transforming XML
is so small that optimizing it would be pointless, but in high volume
messaging and database scenarios there's clear evidence that XML processing
is often a bottleneck.

The main current dispute is over whether a single binary format can meet a
wide enough range of needs to be worth standardizing.  I suspect there will
also be a fun debate over whether tightly coupling the components of a
distributed application via schemas is worth the performance gains that a
schema-driven efficient serialization format would offer.   The W3C EXI WG
has collected a mountain of data on the question of how much performance and
compression improvement one gets under different scenarios, but it's not yet
released in a conveniently usable form AFAIK.