[jdom-interest] XMLOutputter and newlines afterdeclaration/doctype

Ingo Struck ingo at ingostruck.de
Wed Dec 18 12:21:20 PST 2002


Hi all...

I tracked that discussion and want to add some words too:

> Vadim.Strizhevsky at morganstanley.com wrote:
> >Yes, it is about XML, and should be. Therefore you should let me
> >output XML the way I _want_ to.
I guess, that you will, like me and some of my colleagues did in the past
two years, discover that this (at least your particular problem) really is
*not* about XML, as well as most of your day-life problems. :o)

> >Why do you all feel that it is such a big or unusual thing to ask for,
> >to be able to produce XML with no white space or newlines?
We made extensive - and to be honest bitter - experiences with the use
of multi-xml-doc / db-like structures. If you want a good advice, try to use
something that suits your problem.

> >2) performance.
>
> You've done the testing necessary to prove that XML parsing is a problem?

> Yes. XML parsing and XMLoutputer is number 1 performance bottlenecks. I've
> done some mods to XMLOuttpuer to increase performance even furhter. But
> this for a separate mail.
I highly agree. 
Of course that is *always* the main performance problem.
It is not an implementation specific problem, but has much to do with
maladjustment to hardware / operating system structures the XML approach
implies. And you are right, this is a whole discussion thread, that should be
discussed elsewhere.

> Without getting into a flame war here, I agree with Vadim on this. This
> whole thing seems to be turning into a debate on how he's using JDOM.
> That's fine, if someone feels the missionary compulsion to go out and
> convert the heathens to the One True Religion, but doesn't change the
> point that his basic request seems reasonable and appropriate.
The words of a sage...
Maybe the question here should rather be whether to use XML everywhere.
It is really not for the purpose of readability, if a configuration entry of a 
well-known web-app server looks like:

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>init</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.foo.bar.InitServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
      <param-name>debug</param-name>
      <param-value>2</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
 </servlet>

where it could look like:

servlet/init/class = org.foo.bar.InitServlet
servlet/init/debug = 2
servlet/init/load-on-startup = 1

I think it is comprehensible that the latter is much easier to read, both for
machine and human readers. :o)

<flames value="on" /> respectively flames/on...

Kind regards

Ingo



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