Even though XML and XPath have been around for several years, there's still room for performance improvements—and VTD-XML and its XPath implementation provide them.
by Jimmy Zhang
March 19, 2007
or the past several years, XPath has been steadily gaining popularity as an effective tool when developing XML applications. XPath was originally viewed as an adjunct element for the W3C's XSLT and XPointer specifications, but developers found its simplicity appealing. With XPath, instead of manually navigating the hierarchical data structure, you can use compact, "file-system"-like expressions to address any node or set of nodes in XML documents. However, most existing XPath engines work with DOM trees or similar object models, which are slow to build and modify—and consume excessive amounts of memory. This presents a dilemma for anyone looking to take advantage of XPath for SOA applications that are either performance sensitive or routinely deal with large XML documents.
My last two articles with DevX (see the Related Resources) introduced VTD-XML as a next-generation XML processing model that goes beyond DOM and SAX in performance, memory usage, and ease of use. VTD-XML is simultaneously:
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or the past several years, XPath has been steadily gaining popularity as an effective tool when developing XML applications. XPath was originally viewed as an adjunct element for the W3C's XSLT and XPointer specifications, but developers found its simplicity appealing. With XPath, instead of manually navigating the hierarchical data structure, you can use compact, "file-system"-like expressions to address any node or set of nodes in XML documents. However, most existing XPath engines work with DOM trees or similar object models, which are slow to build and modify—and consume excessive amounts of memory. This presents a dilemma for anyone looking to take advantage of XPath for SOA applications that are either performance sensitive or routinely deal with large XML documents.
