XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Wolfgang Hoschek <whoschek AT lbl.gov>]

> > However the problem with this solution is that it adds another 4 
> bytes
> > per element to XOM's memory footprint, and I don't think that's a 
> price
> > I'm willing to pay here. I'll see if I can fix the problem some other
> > way that has less of a downside.
>
> Most apps retreive not only the next child but from the same parent
> element.  You could therefore keep global (or thread-local) state
> of lastParent and lastPosition.  However, experiment would be needed
> to see if the required synchronization or thread-local variable would
> be expensive enough to make the optimization pointless. 

Reverting to a recursive DOMConverter (as in version d25) doubles 
performance, so I'd suggest that as the best path forward.

This is much better than 10-20% and it does not increase memory 
footprint, and does not exhibit the subtle and nasty thread-safety 
problems that are quite likely to occur with position tracking in 
instance variables. Also, a ThreadLocal per parentnode would most 
likely be a memory and performance disaster.

Wolfgang.