XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Mike Colbert <mbcolbert AT yahoo.com>]

> A streaming NodeFactory enables efficient filtering and can avoid the  
> need to build a main memory tree, which is particularly useful for  
> large documents. The XOM Tutorial has a section on such streaming:  
> http://www.xom.nu/tutorial.xhtml#d0e1424

That's an option, but I wonder if this will really speed things up in my case.

It seems the bottlenecks are 1.) reading the entire file contents into a 
String
using a standard InputStream read.  2.) Parsing the String.  Once the XOM
document is built, the traversal is very fast.

Using a NodeFactory will eliminate the traversal step, obviously, because I 
can
combine my processing with the parsing, but how will it actually speed up the
parsing itself?  Or is it a matter of it being time-consuming to create the
in-memory tree itself, once it's parsed?

If it matters, all I am doing is taking a set of identifiers, finding
corresponding records in these large files, and reading them out to disk.


> A NodeFactory is a user defined high level callback fed by the  
> Builder, conceptually similar to a SAX ContentHandler.

Yes, great feature of the XOM API.  I've written a NodeFactory before and use
it all the time as part of a Visitor framework I wrote for XOM.  Good stuff.

Mike