System.XML performance vs. user unfriendly SAX?

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From Aaron Skonnard's blog at https://skonnard.com/archive/2004/03/18/288.aspx

System.Xml Perf and Sun's Ploy

Mark provides some insight into Webdata's thoughts on System.Xml performance, spurred by a recent performance study published by Sun. I completely agree with Mark's assessment that “...usability is as important as performance and the Java APIs on the whole have significantly lagged behind System.Xml in this respect.”

The fact that most Java SAX parsers outperform .NET's XmlReader is meaningless in my opinion. Every customer I've worked with would take XmlReader's usability over the best SAX solution any day of the week, even if it means a decrease in perf. In general, XmlReader's perf is good enough for most customers needs and when you begin comparing the complexity of the soluttion code for most typical tasks, XmlReader clearly dominates.

Overall, the report seems like a transparent ploy to distract developers from noticing Sun's lack of XML innovation.

posted on Thursday, March 18, 2004 12:58 PM