XOM API for Processing XML with Java

[Michael Whapples <software AT mdw.onl>]

Hello,

I was recently profiling an application which uses XOM with the 
intention to improve performance. I noticed that in a section of code 
where it does a reasonable amount of XML manipulation a significant 
amount was down to calls to Text.setValue and Text.getValue. I could 
appreciate setValue may need to do some validation checks, but I had 
always thought getValue would have been a simple getter, the profiling 
data told me otherwise.


I decided to examine the XOM source code to see exactlyt what is being 
done in the Text class. This leads to the following question:

Why is data stored as a UTF8 byte array rather than as a String? Storing 
as byte array requires conversion and associated memory allocation upon 
every call to setValue and getValue. I see nothing in the source code 
where the byte array is used directly. The only functionality I can see 
related to it is that if the JVM does not support UTF8 encoding then 
setValue will throw an exception, but I would have thought this check 
would have been better placed in some initialising code so it is only 
run once per JVM session.


Could this be changed in XOM or is there some reason I have overlooked 
why it is done the way it is?


Regards


Michael Whapples