[This article was our best-read XML-related article in 2006.]
Since its inception, XML has been criticized for the overhead it introduces
into the enterprise infrastructure. Business data encoded in XML takes five
to 10 times more bandwidth to transmit in the network and proportionally more
disk space to store. While most agree that verbosity is inherent to XML's way
of encoding information (e.g., extensive use of tags and pointy brackets),
the explanation of XML's perceived performance issue remains inconclusive. A
popular belief is that since XML is human-readable text, it has to be slow
and inefficient. And by the same token, proponents of binary XML seem to
suggest that a compact encoding format, most noticeably the binary XML, would
automatically lead to better processing performance.
Does it make sense for doctors to prescribe medicine without a diagnosis?
Whet... (more)
Traditionally DOM or SAX-based enterprise applications have to repeat
CPU-intensive XML parsing when accessing the same documents multiple times.
VTD-XML 2.0 introduces a simple general-purpose XML index called VTD+XML
(http://vtd-xml.sourceforge.net/persistence.html) that eliminates the need
for repetitive parsing of those applications.
This article combines various examples and the latest benchmark reports to
show you how to get started with this indexing. This article also discusses
various scenarios and use cases where you may find VTD+XML useful.
Avoid Repetitive XML Parsing... (more)
SOAP is an XML based data protocol standardized by W3C for the purpose of
enabling inter-application data exchange over the Internet. In a typical Web
Services scenario, a SOAP message delivered via HTTP needs to be parsed
before anything else can happen. As two popular SOAP processing methods, DOM
and SAX/Pull force application developers to choose between
performance/memory efficiency and ease of use. VTD-XML is the latest
open-source, "non-extractive" XML processing API written in Java that
overcomes many problems and issues of the status quo. The combination of its
high per... (more)
This article introduces the concept of document-centric XML processing and a
set of emerging document-centric capabilities such as cutting, splitting, and
splicing documents at the byte level. It also explains how it solves one of
the most fundamental technical issues hampering enterprise SOA and XML
application development: the redundant serialization and de-serialization of
object-oriented XML processing models such as DOM.
Public Enemy #1: DOM's Problem of Modifying XML
If a DOM-based application modifies a particular text node of an XML
document, the following steps are needed... (more)