RE: Xalan performance

["Peter McEvoy" <peter dot mcevoy at iona dot com>]

> Peter,
>   We have a very similar situation.  We are about to
> investigate using XT.  Our preliminiary evaluation is that it
> is MUCH faster.  We need to look into whether it has an
> API and how well it conforms to the standard.

Alan,
	Thanks for your feedback - it's kinda reassuring that others are seeing
this as an issue. Today I've actually managed to do quite a bit of research
and have investigated already:

XT - certainly an alternative, but they freely admit that it was not built
with performance in mind.  They have a Java API and it is possible to build
a servlet to use it.

Saxon - I am currently looking at this - it really does look like it is
about 400% faster than Xalan.  It has a full java API, and they even have a
sample servlet which does transforms (although the servlet needs a bit of
work to be as fully featured as DefaultApplyXSL).  From initial estaimates,
I think Saxon will take about 3+ seconds to do the transform that I have.

Sablotron - this is a C++ library which SCREAMS along.  I will investigate
next how I can make JNDI calls to the librabry file and transform my files.
FYI, my 14second Xalan transform takes 0.5 seconds in this (yup, I said one
half of a second...!!!).  However, they don't fully implement the XSL
standard yet.

Translets - From Sun - will look at this.  You can compile your XSL sheets
into classes and just run XML through it.  They say it is 3-10 times faster
than XT.  See http://www.sun.com/software/xml/developers/xsltc/article.html


There were also a few commercial ones as well, I'd like to exhaust my
options on the open source side and then start calling companies.  These
are:

DataPower - some XSL acceleration technology.  They have some interesting
other stuff, though - worth a nosy.

Non-runners:

Cocoon - this just uses the Xalan jar anyway.

I tried finding stuff on Alphaworks.ibm.com, and it seems that they too base
their XSL engine on Xalan.


Thanks to everone who mailed me with tips - this seems to be a hot issue....

Peter McEvoy
Senior Technical Analyst
IONA Technologies PLC



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