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Re: Fast text output from SAX?

• To: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
• Subject: Re: Fast text output from SAX?
• From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
• Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 23:08:53 -0400
• Cc: XML DEV <xml-dev@l...>
• In-reply-to: <407C6010.80908@s...>
• References: <407B3720.3070605@s...><p06010208bca181cca495@[192.168.254.88]> <407C1F19.1080003@s...><p06010211bca1d324c11b@[192.168.254.88]> <407C3537.9080806@s...><p06010215bca1e7467bef@[192.168.254.88]> <407C3D3E.6030805@s...><407C4C57.3040601@c...> <407C6010.80908@s...>

At 2:48 PM -0700 4/13/04, Dennis Sosnoski wrote:

>Obviously I can't test every possible internal form that might be 
>used by an application. However, the vast majority of XML document 
>processing in Java is currently built on the event streams produced 
>by SAX parsers. Any general XML format should be convertible to and 
>from an event stream of this type, and in practice that's the way 
>any alternative general formats are likely to be used (at least in 
>the near term).


That doesn't sound at all plausible to me. If I have a specific 
internal data structure that I wish to convert to XML, I would never 
go through SAX. If I really didn't care about performance I might go 
through XOM or JDOM, but if I cared about performance I'd just dump 
out the strings or bytes as seemed appropriate. While certainly a few 
people are using the SAX API to drive output, it's hardly a common 
thing to do, nor is it at all necessary. I just can't see how the 
task you want to benchmark corresponds to how XML is used.

The fact is XML is deliberately simple enough to be output 
straight-forwardly without any fancy libraries.  I can believe a 
format like XBIS might be so complex that it really requires the 
overhead of a special library just for output. But XML just isn't 
that complicated.  Unfortunately the massive gains in programmer 
productivity from using a straight-forward, text format that can be 
inspected and debugged in any text editor are rarely measured by 
benchmarks. :-(
-- 

   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:
  • fast or readable ... [Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Aleksander Slominski <aslom@c...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>

• References:
  • Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: "Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@c...>
  • Re: Fast text output from SAX?
    • From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>

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