[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] re: SAX2 and Symmetrical Treatment of Data
Alex Milowski writes: > In the ContentHandler interface, there is a method called character() > which allows the processor to pass the character data that is a child > of an element to a processing application. If you introduce XML Schemas, > this allows one to create a streaming type factory to construct the > actual type instance without having to first instantiate a Java > string--which is very good from an optimization standpoint. Yes, although Java Strings are much more efficient than they used to be, at least in the Linux VM's. I remember running some tests a couple of years ago when Tim Bray suggested that string allocation was expensive, and the overhead of allocating thousands of strings turned out to be negligible. I think that JDK 1.1 must have fixed some problems there. > Unfortunately, the same concept does not exist for attributes. An > attribute's value is already been constructed into a Java string before > the application can receive the lexical representation. This seems rather > unforunate for XML Schemas and optimization since the typing of "leaf > nodes" within an XML document is uniform for attributes and element child > content. This was a matter of much discussion during the original SAX 1.0 design, and most people preferred it this way. > Is it too late to fix this? This would seriously help in building > optimized XML Schema aware processors. Yes, it's too late to fix this, at least for now -- I intend a bug-fix release soon, but no major API changes for a while (except extensions, which are outside the SAX2 core). I'd be interested in seeing some profiling data to see how much the string allocation is actually costing. Note that a parser (though not a filter, obviously) could perform lazy allocation of strings -- that might help a bit. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/
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