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

["Michael Kay" <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> When you pull back the curtain and see how little is really 
> going on, you're often a lot less impressed than when you 
> didn't understand what is going on. That's as true in 
> technology as magic. Both are the art of making seemingly 
> complex things happen through relatively simple trickery.

I was once sent by a previous employer to visit one of the hardware
acceleration companies, to see if they had anything that we could use. I
returned empty-handed, because the company in question wasn't prepared to
give any technical information or performance figures that we could use to
make an informed decision. The experience made me very sceptical.

Today, Datapower's site indicates transformation performance of 5-10 Mb/sec,
which is well within the range that can be achieved by Saxon running on my
laptop: though they don't publish details of the source documents or
stylesheets used to obtain these measures, so one can't verify the figures. 

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/