Streaming XML and SAX

Marcelo Cantos marcelo at mds.rmit.edu.au
Mon Mar 1 00:49:03 GMT 1999


On Sat, Feb 27, 1999 at 08:50:12AM -0800, Tom Harding wrote:
> David Megginson wrote:
> 
> > No, it still looks like a messy architecture to me, because the
> > transport layer has to know about the packets -- it has to parse
> > the XML about to get information about what it's looking at, and
> > that adds complexity and inefficiency.  A clean architecture
> > should separate the layers completely, and use XML only where it
> > has an obvious advantage over other approaches.
> 
> It's amazing how two people can see things so differently.  I think
> it's supremely elegant that only the XML processor needs to look at
> data coming off the wire.  It's also as efficient as it gets.  Of
> course the software architecture that handles the documents emitted
> must be modular and extensible, but the task of parsing is done.

It has already been pointed out in this discussion that some
environments try to increase the throughput by dispatching documents
off to different threads.  A system with 50 CPU's is going to be
operating as low as 2% capacity if it is forced to pipe the entire
parsing load through a single thread.  I don't see how you can argue
that this is efficient.

Nor do I agree that concentrating the workload at a single conceptual
point is elegant.  It is much more aesthetically pleasing to let the
protocol break up packets and let the XML parser parse XML.


Cheers,
Marcelo

-- 
http://www.simdb.com/~marcelo/

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