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An Overview of Modern XML Processing Techniques and APIs

Posted by timothy on from the three-letters-that-spell-work dept.

Dare Obasanjo writes with a link to his article "A Survey of APIs and Techniques for Processing XML" on xml.net. It starts off "In recent times the landscape of APIs and techniques for processing XML has been in the process of reinventing itself as developers and API designers learn from their experiences and some past mistakes. APIs such as DOM and SAX which used to be the bread and butter of XML APIs are giving way to new models of examining and processing XML. However although some of these techniques have become widespread amongst developers who primarily work with XML they are still unknown to the general body of developers. Nothing highlights this better than a recent article by Tim Bray one of the co-inventors of XML entitled XML is too Hard for Programmers and the subsequent responses on Slashdot." Read the entire article to learn more about the state of the XML art. Added in the missing link.

2 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Actually on xml.com by DeathBunny · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article is actually on xml.com, not xml.net. Here is the url: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/07/09/xmlapis.html

  2. Re:Plain Text and XML by jwdg · · Score: 4, Informative
    Manipulating XML may be cheaper than you think. libxml2 is very fast (IME) - I've used it with PostgreSQL for doing XPath queries on database columns and it is fast enough to make an XPath search (which involves building a DOM, parsing the XPath query and then executing it, for each row) across 1200 rows sufficiently fast to be useful. (It was a fraction of a second IIRC - obviosuly dependent on the nature of our XML docs).

    Yeah, I was surprised too.

    I disagree about the human readable/writable bit. It is easily human readable/writable if it's properly structured (if it's complex because the information is complex, that's an inevitability. Make the data model simpler, if that's a problem to you). In terms of efficiency - sure, binary formats are more efficient, but they are much harder to debug when they go wrong.

    I agree that XML documents are not necessarily self-documenting. That isn't surprising. XML is about syntax, not semantics. You can use XSD to provide basic (integer vs char) semantics, but anything more complicated comes back to human understanding and agreed specification. If you understand the objects in your schema, XML can provide a good presentation of those objects.