[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?

• To: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
• Subject: Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 15:36:47 -0500
• Cc: Jeff Rafter <lists@j...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <4038F4A0.7090503@s...>
• References: <01b201c3f95a$4a6e47a0$6403a8c0@ARIMATHEA><p06010204bc5e7fd9b1cb@[192.168.254.4]> <4038F4A0.7090503@s...>

At 10:27 AM -0800 2/22/04, Dennis Sosnoski wrote:

>Can you mention what the main flaws are for Piccolo? I've seen a 
>number of companies using it, and from what I remember it's also the 
>basis of the parser used by BEA's NetBeans (now part of Apache, so 
>that may be changing). Many people would consider BEA's main XML 
>infrastructure project to be serious work. :-)

Come here me talk at XML Europe in a couple of months and I'll give 
you the complete rundown on a whole bunch of SAX parsers and exactly 
where each one screws up. But several problems with Piccolo include:

1. Inability to recognize ignorable white space.
2. Use of non-standard ENUMERATION attribute type instead of NMTOKEN
3. Failure to handle document type declarations that only contain a 
root element name
4. Frequent throwing of ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsExceptions when 
encountering various kinds of well-formedness errors
5. It treats <name/> and <name></name> differently. For <name></name> 
it calls characters() between startElement and endElement and sets 
length to 0.

Arguably 1 and 5 are acceptable. I'd love to hear peoples' opinions 
about 5. Is this legitimate?

Those are just the problems I happen to know of off the top of my 
head. As I said, I'll have a more complete list in Amsterdam.

>Piccolo was considerably faster than the Xerces version in use at 
>the time it first came out, but the Xerces team seems to have put 
>more of a focus on performance since then. Recent versions of Xerces 
>look to be about on a par with Piccolo performance.

Xerces has problems of its own, rather large ones in fact. Details in 
Amsterdam.

-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@m...
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: Aleksander Slominski <aslom@c...>
  • Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>

• References:
  • Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: "Jeff Rafter" <lists@j...>
  • Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>

• Prev by Date: Re: SAX Topic 2004-0002: XML 1.1 support
• Next by Date: Re: RDDL: Can we add a 'copyright' version
• Previous by thread: Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
• Next by thread: Re: Piccolo Java SAX parser and others in the wild?
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread